GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
NP-MiSR: Neural Process-based Multi-Interest Learning for Session-Based Recommendation
Authors: Jun Bao; Junbo Wang; Yiheng Jiang; Xiangfeng Liu; Mingyang Lv; Yuanbo Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to provide users with satisfactory suggestions via modeling preferences based on short-term, anonymous user-item interaction sequences. Traditional single interest learning methods struggle to align with the diverse nature of preferences. Recent advances resolved this bottleneck by learning multiple interest embeddings for each session. However, due to the pre-defining scheme of interest quantity (e.g. the number of interests), these approaches are deficient in adaptive ability towards distinctive preference patterns across different users. Moreover, these methods rely solely on the current session and ignore useful information from related ones. The short-term property of sessions would magnify the insufficient representation issue. To address these limitations, we propose a Neural Process-based Multi-interest learning framework for Session-based Recommendation, namely NP-MiSR. To be specific, our method enables adaptive multi-interest representation learning through two complementary mechanisms: 1) Neural Process-based Intra-session interest modeling: We employ Neural Processes to model the distribution of interests within a session, where the fixed interest configurations are no longer needed. 2) Cross-session context fusion: We extract interest distributions of similar sessions as contextual priors to refine the current session’s interest representation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SBR approaches with an average improvement of 38.8%. Moreover, the few-shot learning task reveals that NP-MiSR achieves a surprisingly favorable efficiency v.s. performance trade-off where utilizing only 10% of the training data attains 95% of the recommendation performance.
DynaQuant: Dynamic Mixed-Precision Quantization for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Youneng Bao; Yulong Cheng; Yiping Liu; Yichen Yang; Peng Qin; Mu Li; Yongsheng Liang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Prevailing quantization techniques in Learned Image Compression (LIC) typically employ a static, uniform bit-width across all layers, failing to adapt to the highly diverse data distributions and sensitivity characteristics inherent in LIC models. This leads to a suboptimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DynaQuant, a novel framework for dynamic mixed-precision quantization that operates on two complementary levels. First, we propose content-aware quantization, where learnable scaling and offset parameters dynamically adapt to the statistical variations of latent features. This fine-grained adaptation is trained end-to-end using a novel Distance-aware Gradient Modulator (DGM), which provides a more informative learning signal than the standard Straight-Through Estimator. Second, we introduce a data-driven, dynamic bit-width selector that learns to assign an optimal bit precision to each layer, dynamically reconfiguring the network's precision profile based on the input data. Our fully dynamic approach offers substantial flexibility in balancing rate-distortion (R-D) performance and computational cost. Experiments demonstrate that DynaQuant achieves R-D performance comparable to full-precision models while significantly reducing computational and storage requirements, thereby enabling the practical deployment of advanced LIC on diverse hardware platforms.
Fidelity-Aware Recommendation Explanations via Stochastic Path Integration
Authors: Oren Barkan; Yahlly Schein; Yehonatan Elisha; Veronika Bogina; Mikhail Baklanov; Noam Koenigstein
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Explanation fidelity, which measures how accurately an explanation reflects a model’s true reasoning, remains critically underexplored in recommender systems. We introduce SPINRec (Stochastic Path Integration for Neural Recommender Explanations), a model-agnostic approach that adapts path-integration techniques to the sparse and implicit nature of recommendation data. To overcome the limitations of prior methods, SPINRec employs stochastic baseline sampling: instead of integrating from a fixed or unrealistic baseline, it samples multiple plausible user profiles from the empirical data distribution and selects the most faithful attribution path. This design captures the influence of both observed and unobserved interactions, yielding more stable and personalized explanations. We conduct the most comprehensive fidelity evaluation to date across three models (MF, VAE, NCF), three datasets (ML1M, Yahoo! Music, Pinterest), and a suite of counterfactual metrics, including AUC-based perturbation curves and fixed-length diagnostics. SPINRec consistently outperforms all baselines, establishing a new benchmark for faithful explainability in recommendation.
F2RVLM: Boosting Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval for Multi-Modal Long-form Dialogue with Vision Language Model
Authors: Hanbo Bi; Zhiqiang Yuan; Zexi Jia; Jiapei Zhang; Chongyang Li; Peixiang Luo; Ying Deng; Xiaoyue Duan; Jinchao Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Traditional dialogue retrieval aims to select the most appropriate utterance or image from recent dialogue history. However, they often fail to meet users’ actual needs for revisiting semantically coherent content scattered across long-form conversations. To fill this gap, we define the Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval (FFR) task, requiring models to locate query-relevant fragments, comprising both utterances and images, from multimodal long-form dialogues. As a foundation for FFR, we construct MLDR, the longest-turn multimodal dialogue retrieval dataset to date, averaging 25.45 turns per dialogue, with each naturally spanning three distinct topics. To evaluate generalization in real-world scenarios, we curate and annotate a WeChat-based test set comprising real-world multimodal dialogues with an average of 75.38 turns. Building on these resources, we explore existing generation-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on FFR and observe that they often retrieve incoherent utterance-image fragments. While optimized for generating responses from visual-textual inputs, these models lack explicit supervision to ensure semantic coherence within retrieved fragments. To address this, we propose F2RVLM, a generative retrieval model trained in a two-stage paradigm: (1) supervised fine-tuning to inject fragment-level retrieval knowledge, and (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning with multi-objective rewards to encourage outputs with semantic precision, relevance, and contextual coherence. In addition, to account for difficulty variations arising from differences in intra-fragment element distribution, ranging from locally dense to sparsely scattered, we introduce a difficulty-aware curriculum sampling that ranks training instances by predicted difficulty and gradually incorporates harder examples. This strategy enhances the model’s reasoning ability in long-form, multi-turn dialogue contexts. Experiments on both in-domain and real-domain sets demonstrate that F2RVLM substantially outperforms popular VLMs, achieving superior retrieval performance.
HCF: Hierarchical Cascade Framework for Distributed Multi-Stage Image Compression
Authors: Junhao Cai; Taegun An; Chengjun Jin; Sung Il Choi; Juhyun Park; Changhee Joo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Distributed multi-stage image compression—where visual content traverses multiple processing nodes under varying quality requirements—poses challenges. Progressive methods enable bitstream truncation but underutilize available compute resources; successive compression repeats costly pixel-domain operations and suffers cumulative quality loss and inefficiency; fixed-parameter models lack post-encoding flexibility. In this work, we developed the Hierarchical Cascade Framework (HCF) that achieves high rate-distortion performance and better computational efficiency through direct latent-space transformations across network nodes in distributed multi-stage image compression systems. Under HCF, we introduced policy-driven quantization control to optimize rate–distortion trade-offs, and established the edge quantization principle through differential entropy analysis. The configuration based on this principle demonstrates up to 0.6dB PSNR gains over other configurations. When comprehensively evaluated on the Kodak, CLIC, and CLIC2020-mobile datasets, HCF outperforms successive-compression methods by up to 5.56% BD-Rate in PSNR on CLIC, while saving up to 97.8% FLOPs, 96.5% GPU memory, and 90.0% execution time. It also outperforms state-of-the-art progressive compression methods by up to 12.64% BD-Rate on Kodak and enables retraining-free cross-quality adaptation with 7.13-10.87% BD-Rate reductions on CLIC2020-mobile.
Augmenting Intra-Modal Understanding in MLLMs for Robust Multimodal Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Jiajun Cao; Qinggang Zhang; Yunbo Tang; Zhishang Xiang; Chang Yang; Jinsong Su
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal keyphrase generation (MKP) aims to extract a concise set of keyphrases that capture the essential meaning of paired image–text inputs, enabling structured understanding, indexing, and retrieval of multimedia data across the web and social platforms. Success in this task demands effectively bridging the semantic gap between heterogeneous modalities. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve superior cross-modal understanding by leveraging massive pretraining on image-text corpora, we observe that they often struggle with modality bias and fine-grained intra-modal feature extraction. This oversight leads to a lack of robustness in real-world scenarios where multimedia data is noisy, along with incomplete or misaligned modalities. To address this problem, we propose AimKP, a novel framework that explicitly reinforces intra-modal semantic learning in MLLMs while preserving cross-modal alignment. AimKP incorporates two core innovations: (i) Progressive Modality Masking, which forces fine-grained feature extraction from corrupted inputs by progressively masking modality information during training; (ii) Gradient-based Filtering, that identifies and discards noisy samples, preventing them from corrupting the model’s core cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments validate AimKP’s effectiveness in multimodal keyphrase generation and its robustness across different scenarios.
VBF++: Variational Bayesian Fusion with Context-Aware Priors and Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement for Multimodal Video Recommendation
Authors: Ziyi Cao; Rui Liu; Yong Chen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal video recommendation systems face fundamental challenges in determining optimal fusion strategies across diverse content types and user preferences. Existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) their fusion strategies are guided by context-agnostic priors that ignore the semantic structure of content, assuming the same simple distribution (typically a standard multivariate Gaussian prior) governs optimal fusion for all video types, and (2) their optimization objectives, particularly the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), are misaligned with the final recommendation goal, optimizing for feature reconstruction rather than ranking performance. To address these fundamental issues, this work proposes VBF++, a novel framework that introduces context-aware structured priors and recommendation-guided adversarial refinement. First, the method designs context-aware priors that learn cluster-specific distributions based on video semantic categories, replacing uninformative priors with structured, content-aware prior distributions. Second, it introduces a Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement (RAR) paradigm that explicitly steers the learning process towards generating recommendation-optimal fusion strategies, resolving the objective misalignment inherent in variational learning. Enhanced with domain-adaptive meta-learning, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements of 4.7-8.3 percent in Precision@10 over state-of-the-art methods. Analysis reveals that learned fusion strategies exhibit semantically meaningful patterns, prioritizing visual features for action content, acoustic information for music videos, and textual descriptions for documentary material.
Learning to Compress Graphs via Dual Agents for Consistent Topological Robustness Evaluation
Authors: Qisen Chai; Yansong Wang; Junjie Huang; Tao Jia
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As graph-structured data grow increasingly large, evaluating  their robustness under adversarial attacks becomes computationally  expensive and difficult to scale. To address this challenge,  we propose to compress graphs into compact representations  that preserve both topological structure and robustness  profile, enabling efficient and reliable evaluation.We propose Cutter, a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework composed  of a Vital Detection Agent (VDA) and a Redundancy Detection Agent (RDA), which collaboratively identify structurally  vital and redundant nodes for guided compression. Cutter incorporates three key strategies to enhance learning  efficiency and compression quality: trajectory-level reward  shaping to transform sparse trajectory returns into dense,  policy-equivalent learning signals; prototype-based shaping  to guide decisions using behavioral patterns from both highand  low-return trajectories; and cross-agent imitation to enable  safer and more transferable exploration. Experiments  on multiple real-world graphs demonstrate that Cutter generates  compressed graphs that retain essential static topological  properties and exhibit robustness degradation trends highly  consistent with the original graphs under various attack scenarios,  thereby significantly improving evaluation efficiency  without compromising assessment fidelity.
MISF: MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering for Data Fault Detection
Authors: Guoying Chen; Ruizhuo Zhao; Zhewei Xu; Bo Yang; Kunlong Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: High quality datasets are critical for training reliable machine learning models, yet data faults caused by insufficient annotation expertise or malicious poisoning attacks remain prevalent. Traditional classifier based methods rely on manually curated subsets for fault detection, but their limited scale frequently leads to model overfitting. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) based methods offer promising detection capabilities, their few-shot learning limitations hinder generalization in domain specific tasks. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering (MISF), a novel framework that combines the strengths of MLLM based initialization and iterative data refinement. Our framework initializes the detection model with MLLM generated synthetic images and a curated clean subset, then iteratively refines it by progressively selecting high certainty clean samples, improving both domain adaptation and detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on RESISC45 and Oxford-IIIT Pets datasets demonstrate that MISF effectively identifies data faults, outperforming existing approaches. MISF provides a robust, scalable solution for improving dataset quality in specialized domains.
Breaking the Aggregation Bottleneck in Federated Recommendation: A Personalized Model Merging Approach
Authors: Jundong Chen; Honglei Zhang; Chunxu Zhang; Fangyuan Luo; Yidong Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Federated recommendation (FR) facilitates collaborative training by aggregating local models from massive devices, enabling client-specific personalization while ensuring privacy. However, we empirically and theoretically demonstrate that server-side aggregation can undermine client-side personalization, leading to suboptimal performance, i.e., the aggregation bottleneck. This issue stems from the inherent heterogeneity across numerous clients in FR, which drives the global model to deviate from local optima. To this end, we propose FedEM, which elastically merges the global and local models to compensate for impaired personalization. Unlike existing personalized federated recommendation (pFR) methods, FedEM (1) investigates the aggregation bottleneck in FR through theoretical insights, rather than relying on heuristic analysis; (2) leverages off-the-shelf local models rather than designing additional mechanisms to boost personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method preserves client personalization during collaborative training, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
Diffusion Reconstruction-based Data Likelihood Estimation for Core-Set Selection
Authors: Mingyang Chen; Jiawei Du; Bo Huang; Yi Wang; Xiaobo Zhang; Wei Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing core-set selection methods predominantly rely on heuristic scoring signals such as training dynamics or model uncertainty, lacking explicit modeling of data likelihood. This omission may hinder the constructed subset from capturing subtle yet critical distributional structures that underpin effective model training. In this work, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded approach that leverages diffusion models to estimate data likelihood via reconstruction deviation induced by partial reverse denoising. Specifically, we establish a formal connection between reconstruction error and data likelihood, grounded in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of Markovian diffusion processes, thereby enabling a principled, distribution-aware scoring criterion for data selection. Complementarily, we introduce an efficient information-theoretic method to identify the optimal reconstruction timestep, ensuring that the deviation provides a reliable signal indicative of underlying data likelihood. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that reconstruction deviation offers an effective scoring criterion, consistently outperforming existing baselines across selection ratios, and closely matching full-data training using only 50% of the data. Further analysis shows that the likelihood-informed nature of our score reveals informative insights in data selection, shedding light on the interplay between data distributional characteristics and model learning preferences.
Transform-Free Feature Coding via Entropy-Constrained Vector Quantization
Authors: Qiaoxi Chen; Changsheng Gao; Li Li; Dong Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Feature coding has recently emerged as a key technique for efficient transmission of intermediate representations in distributed AI systems. Existing approaches largely follow a transform-based pipeline inherited from image and video coding, where the transform module is used to remove spatial structural redundancies in visual signals. However, our analysis indicates that such redundancies have already been largely removed during feature extraction, which reduces the necessity of the transform module. Building on this insight, we propose a new transform-free pipeline that directly encodes the extracted features via a vector quantization module and an entropy model. The proposed transform‑free framework jointly learns the quantization codebook and entropy model, enabling end‑to‑end optimization tailored to the inherent feature characteristics. Furthermore, the proposed method inherently avoids the computational complexity of the transform module. Experiments on features from diverse architectures and tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior rate-distortion performance compared to transform-based baselines, while significantly reducing the encoding and decoding complexity.
ProRec-Video: Guiding Hierarchical Interest Transitions for Proactive Short Video Recommendation with Dynamic Feedback Adaptation
Authors: Weizhi Chen; Baoyun Peng; Bo Liu; Xingkong Ma; Houjie Qiu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Traditional short video recommendations primarily enhance user retention by reinforcing existing user preferences, potentially leading to information cocoons. Conversely, proactive recommendations aim to diversify user interests by exposing users to content beyond their historical preferences. However, current proactive approaches face three limitations: (1) homogeneous receptivity assumption, neglecting individual differences in users' openness to new interests; (2) short-term item exposure without interest anchoring, focusing on item-level shifts rather than interest evolution; and (3) static feedback utilization, failing to incorporate dynamic user feedback during the recommendation adequately. To address these challenges, we propose ProRec-Video, a proactive framework that guides hierarchical interest transitions through three innovations. First, User Receptivity Profiling assesses individual openness for new interests, ensuring personalized transition pacing. Second, Hierarchical Interest Transition Planning decomposes complex interest shifts into intermediate steps to generate smooth interest transition paths and semantically coherent video sequences, addressing overemphasis on item exposure. Third, Dynamic Feedback Adaptation integrates agent-based simulation and Reflexion mechanisms to refine interest transition paths and video sequences based on real-time user feedback, enhancing adaptability and satisfaction. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that ProRec-Video achieves a significant improvement in proactive recommendation performance, with an interest transition success rate of 85% and a user satisfaction rate of 78.3%.
Dual-Kernel Graph Community Contrastive Learning
Authors: Xiang Chen; Kun Yue; Wenjie Liu; Zhenyu Zhang; Liang Duan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the absence of task-specific labels. However, its scalability on large-scale graphs is hindered by the intensive message passing mechanism of GNN and the quadratic computational complexity of contrastive loss over positive and negative node pairs. To address these issues, we propose an efficient GCL framework that transforms the input graph into a compact network of interconnected node sets while preserving structural information across communities. We firstly introduce a kernelized graph community contrastive loss with linear complexity, enabling effective information transfer among node sets to capture hierarchical structural information of the graph. We then incorporate a knowledge distillation technique into the decoupled GNN architecture to accelerate inference while maintaining strong generalization performance. Extensive experiments on sixteen real-world datasets of varying scales demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art GCL baselines in both effectiveness and scalability.