GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Introducing Decomposed Causality with Spatiotemporal Object-Centric Representation for Video Classification
Authors: Yachong Zhang; Lei Meng; Shuo Xu; Zhuang Qi; Wei Wu; Lei Wu; Xiangxu Meng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Video classification requires event-level representations of objects and their interactions. Existing methods typically rely on data-driven approaches, which either learn such features from whole frames or object-centric visual regions. Therefore, the modeling of spatiotemporal interactions among objects is usually overlooked. To address this issue, this paper presents a Decomposition of Synergistic, Unique, and Redundant Causal Representations Learning (SurdCRL) model for video classification, which introduces a newly-proposed SURD causal theory to model the spatiotemporal features of both object dynamics and their in- and cross-frame interactions. Specifically, SurdCRL employs three modules to model the object-centric spatiotemporal dynamics using distinct types of causal components, where the first module Spatial-Temporal Entity Modeling decouples the frame into object and context entities, and employs a temporal message passing block to capture object state changes over time, generating spatiotemporal features as basic causal variables. Second, the Dual-Path Causal Inference module mitigates confounders among causal variables by front-door and back-door interventions, thus enabling the subsequent causal components to reflect their intrinsic effects. Finally, the Causal Composition and Selection module employs the compositional structure-aware attention to project the causal variables and their high-order interactions into the synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Experiments on two benchmarking datasets verify that SurdCRL better captures event-relevant object-centric representation by decomposing spatiotemporal object interactions into three types of causal components.
Adaptive Dynamic Dehazing via Instruction-Driven and Task-Feedback Closed-Loop Optimization for Diverse Downstream Task Adaptation
Authors: Yafei Zhang; Shuaitian Song; Huafeng Li; Shujuan Wang; Yu Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In real-world vision systems, haze removal is required not only to enhance image visibility but also to meet the specific needs of diverse downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel adaptive dynamic dehazing framework that incorporates a closed-loop optimization mechanism. It enables feedback-driven refinement based on downstream task performance and user instruction–guided adjustment during inference, allowing the model to satisfy the specific requirements of multiple downstream tasks without retraining. Technically, our framework integrates two complementary and innovative mechanisms: (1) a task feedback loop that dynamically modulates dehazing outputs based on performance across multiple downstream tasks, and (2) a text instruction interface that allows users to specify high-level task preferences. This dual-guidance strategy enables the model to adapt its dehazing behavior after training, tailoring outputs in real time to the evolving needs of multiple tasks. Extensive experiments across various vision tasks demonstrate the strong effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability of our approach. These results establish a new paradigm for interactive, task-adaptive dehazing that actively collaborates with downstream applications.
PET2Rep: Towards Vision-Language Model-Drived Automated Radiology Report Generation for Positron Emission Tomography
Authors: Yichi Zhang; Wenbo Zhang; Zehui Ling; Gang Feng; Sisi Peng; Deshu Chen; Yuchen Liu; Hongwei Zhang; Shuqi Wang; Lanlan Li; Limei Han; Yuan Cheng; Zixin Hu; Yuan Qi; Le Xue
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a cornerstone of modern oncologic and neurologic imaging, distinguished by its unique ability to illuminate dynamic metabolic processes that transcend the anatomical focus of traditional imaging technologies. Radiology reports are essential for clinical decision making, yet their manual creation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent advancements of vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential in medical applications, presenting a promising avenue for automating report generation. However, existing applications of VLMs in the medical domain have predominantly focused on structural imaging modalities, while the unique characteristics of molecular PET imaging have largely been overlooked. To bridge the gap, we introduce PET2Rep, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of general and medical VLMs for radiology report generation for PET images. PET2Rep stands out as the first dedicated dataset for PET report generation with metabolic information, uniquely capturing whole-body image-report pairs that cover dozens of organs to fill the critical gap in existing benchmarks and mirror real-world clinical comprehensiveness. In addition to widely recognized natural language generation metrics, we introduce a series of clinical efficiency metrics to evaluate the quality of radiotracer uptake pattern description in key organs in generated reports. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of 30 cutting-edge general-purpose and medical-specialized VLMs. The results show that the current state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on PET report generation task, falling considerably short of fulfilling practical needs. Moreover, we identify several key insufficiency that need to be addressed to advance the development in medical applications. We believe PET2Rep will serve as a platform for the development and application of VLMs for PET imaging, accelerating the development of trustworthy reporting tools that can genuinely alleviate radiologist burden and enhance patient care.
Cyto-SSL: A Self-Supervised Pretraining Framework for Cytology Foundation Model
Authors: Yiming Zhang; Rui Yan; Xiaohua Wan; Yifan Zhao; Shuang Feng; Zhetao Xu; Ying Wang; Fa Zhang; Bin Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cytological images originate from exfoliated cells, collected via liquid-based slides and digitized into whole slide images (WSIs). Unlike histological WSIs that exhibit continuous and well-structured tissue, cytological WSIs are sparse in spatial distribution and unstructured in cellular relationships. Typically, the nucleus serves as the primary diagnostic feature, while surrounding cytoplasmic information plays a supportive role. These unique characteristics limit the development of effective foundation models and hinder the transferability of histology-based models for cytopathology. To address this, we propose **Cyto-SSL**, the first self-supervised pretraining framework for cytological images. It introduces **Nuclei-Centered Perturbation**, which highlights individual nuclei by perturbing non-nuclear regions. We also design an SR-Transformer module, which complements this by using sparse attention to concentrate on diagnostically relevant scattered cells, while iRPE helps model to capture local spatial relationships and avoids unnecessary attention to irrelevant global structures. Experimental results show that **Cyto-SSL** enhances performance across diverse cytological datasets and Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods. On a WSI-level dataset, it achieved 95.67% accuracy and outperformed ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 by 11.33%, demonstrating superior feature representation for cytological analysis. Additionally, **Cyto-SSL** modules are plug-and-play, easily integrated into other pretraining frameworks, yielding a 2.6% accuracy gain across different SSL methods.
Causal-Tune: Mining Causal Factors from Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yin Zhang; Yongqiang Zhang; Yaoyue Zheng; Bogdan Raducanu; Dan Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Fine-tuning Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with a small number of parameters has shown remarkable performance in Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Most existing works either train lightweight adapters or refine intermediate features to achieve better generalization on unseen domains. However, they both overlook the fact that long-term pre-trained VFMs often exhibit artifacts, which hinder the utilization of valuable representations and ultimately degrade DGSS performance. Inspired by causal mechanisms, we observe that these artifacts are associated with non-causal factors, which usually reside in the low- and high-frequency components of the VFM spectrum. In this paper, we explicitly examine the causal and non-causal factors of features within VFMs for DGSS, and propose a simple yet effective method to identify and disentangle them, enabling more robust domain generalization. Specifically, we propose Causal-Tune, a novel fine-tuning strategy designed to extract causal factors and suppress non-causal ones from the features of VFMs. First, we extract the frequency spectrum of features from each layer using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). A Gaussian band-pass filter is then applied to separate the spectrum into causal and non-causal components. To further refine the causal components, we introduce a set of causal-aware learnable tokens that operate in the frequency domain, while the non-causal components are discarded. Finally, refined features are transformed back into the spatial domain via inverse DCT and passed to the next layer. Extensive experiments conducted on various cross-domain tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Causal-Tune. In particular, our method achieves superior performance under adverse weather conditions, improving +4.8% mIoU over the baseline in snow conditions.
Real Noise Decoupling for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Authors: Yingkai Zhang; Tao Zhang; Jing Nie; Ying Fu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial step in enhancing the quality of HSIs. Noise modeling methods can fit noise distributions to generate synthetic HSIs to train denoising networks. However, the noise in captured HSIs is usually complex and difficult to model accurately, which significantly limits the effectiveness of these approaches. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage noise-decoupling framework that decomposes complex noise into explicitly modeled and implicitly modeled components. This decoupling reduces the complexity of noise and enhances the learnability of HSI denoising methods when applied to real paired data.
Specifically, for explicitly modeled noise, we utilize an existing noise model to generate paired data for pre-training a denoising network, equipping it with prior knowledge to handle the explicitly modeled noise effectively. For implicitly modeled noise, we introduce a high-frequency wavelet guided network. Leveraging the prior knowledge from the pre-trained module, this network adaptively extracts high-frequency features to target and remove the implicitly modeled noise from real paired HSIs. Furthermore, to effectively eliminate all noise components and mitigate error accumulation across stages, a multi-stage learning strategy, comprising separate pre-training and joint fine-tuning, is employed to optimize the entire framework. Extensive experiments on public and our captured datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively handling complex real-world noise and significantly enhancing HSI quality.
LLaVA-UHD v2: Exploiting Hierarchical Vision Granularity in MLLMs via Inverse Semantic Pyramid
Authors: Yipeng Zhang; Yifan Liu; Zonghao Guo; Yidan Zhang; Xuesong Yang; Xiaoying Zhang; Chi Chen; Jun Song; Yuan Yao; Tat-Seng Chua; Maosong Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision transformers (ViTs) are widely employed in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for visual encoding. 
However, they exhibit inferior performance on tasks regarding fine-grained visual perception. We attribute this to the inner limitations of ViTs in capturing diverse visual semantic levels.
To address this, we present Hierarchical window (Hiwin) transformer as a plug-and-play solution for MLLMs, centered around our inverse semantic pyramid (ISP). 
Hiwin transformer comprises two key modules:
(i) a visual detail injection module, which progressively injects low-level visual details into high-level language-aligned semantics features, thereby constructing an ISP,
and 
(ii) a hierarchical window attention module, which leverages cross-scale windows to condense multi-level semantics from the ISP.
Notably, our design achieves an average boost of 3.7% across 14 benchmarks compared with the baseline method, 9.3% on DocVQA for instance.
Integrating Diverse Assignment Strategies into DETRs
Authors: Yiwei Zhang; Jin Gao; Hanshi Wang; Fudong Ge; Guan Luo; Weiming Hu; Zhipeng Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Label assignment is a critical component in object detectors, particularly within DETR-style frameworks where the one-to-one matching strategy, despite its end-to-end elegance, suffers from slow convergence due to sparse supervision. While recent works have explored one-to-many assignments to enrich supervisory signals, they often introduce complex, architecture-specific modifications and typically focus on a single auxiliary strategy, lacking a unified and scalable design. In this paper, we first systematically investigate the effects of ``one-to-many'' supervision and reveal a surprising insight that performance gains are driven not by the sheer quantity of supervision,  but by the diversity of the assignment strategies employed. This finding suggests that a more elegant, parameter-efficient approach is attainable. Building on this insight, we propose LoRA-DETR, a flexible and lightweight framework that seamlessly integrates diverse assignment strategies into any DETR-style detector. Our method augments the primary network with multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) branches during training, each instantiating a different one-to-many assignment rule. These branches act as auxiliary modules that inject rich, varied supervisory gradients into the main model and are discarded during inference, thus incurring no additional computational cost. This design promotes robust joint optimization while maintaining the architectural simplicity of the original detector. Extensive experiments on different baselines validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our work presents a new paradigm for enhancing detectors, demonstrating that diverse ``one-to-many'' supervision can be integrated to achieve state-of-the-art results without compromising model elegance.
SGAT: Learning Feature Matching with Singularity-enhanced Graph Attention Network
Authors: Yizhuo Zhang; Kun Sun; Chang Tang; Yuanyuan Liu; Xin Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The task of image feature matching aims to establish correct correspondences between images from two different views. While approaches based on attention mechanisms have demonstrated remarkable advancements in image feature matching, they still encounter substantial limitations. Specifically, current graph attention network approaches face performance bottlenecks in complex scenarios, such as low-texture regions or occlusions. This limitation stems from the self-attention mechanism, which, when lacking effective guidance, can lead to divergent attention weights or incorrect focus on regions with low discriminability, resulting in matching failures in low-texture environments. Inspired by how humans focus on distinctive regions when performing cross-view matching, we enhance attention to singular points in images that are salient, unique and have high cross-view matching potential during information aggregation, thereby improving matching capability. To realize the aforementioned strategies, we develop a novel Singularity-enhanced Graph Attention Network (SGAT). SGAT leverages Co-potentiality and Multi-Scale Singularity as prior guidance, and designs a Singularity-aware Attention mechanism and a Co-potentiality Guided Attention mechanism , specifically enhancing the perception of singularity and matching potential during feature interaction. Experimental results on multiple datasets, including ScanNet1500, demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art sparse matching methods. In particular, the improvement is most pronounced in complex scenarios such as low-texture environments, significantly enhancing the accuracy and robustness of image matching and its downstream tasks.
Anchor-Guided Discriminative Subspace Alignment and Clustering for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Imagery
Authors: Yongshan Zhang; Zixuan Zhang; Xinxin Wang; Lefei Zhang; Zhihua Cai
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-scene hyperspectral image (HSI) recognition aims to assign a unique label to each pixel in the target scene by transferring knowledge from the source scene. Existing methods primarily rely on fully labeled source data and either partially labeled or unlabeled target data. No prior work has addressed the more challenging scenario of cross-scene recognition without label guidance in both scenes. To bridge this gap, we present the first study on cross-scene HSI clustering, proposing an anchor-guided discriminative subspace alignment and clustering (ADSAC) framework that follows a well-structured three-step learning paradigm to effectively mitigate distribution shifts. Specifically, we first develop an anchor-promoted graph learning (APGL) model to efficiently derive accurate clustering labels for the source scene by leveraging anchor-based structural information. Next, we propose a discriminative cross-scene subspace alignment (DCSA) model to improve feature discriminability and reduce distribution discrepancies. Finally, labels of the target scene are inferred after source clustering and cross-scene alignment. To solve the formulated models, we design tailored optimization algorithms to ensure high-quality learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods.
Joint Implicit and Explicit Language Learning for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition
Authors: Yukang Zhang; Lei Tan; Yang Lu; Yan Yan; Hanzi Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR) has received increasing attention due to its wide application in video surveillance and pedestrian analysis. Some text-enhanced methods tackle this task by converting attributes into language descriptions to facilitate interactive learning between attributes and visual images. However, these generic languages fail to uniquely describe different pedestrian images, missing individual characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Joint Implicit and Explicit Language Guidance Enhancement Learning (JGEL) method, which converts each pedestrian image into a language description with dual language learning to effectively learn enhanced attribute information. Specifically, we first propose an Implicit Language Guidance Learning (ILGL) stream. It projects visual image features into the text embedding space to generate pseudo-word tokens, implicitly modeling image attributes and providing personalized descriptions. Moreover, we propose an Explicit Attribute Enhancement Learning (EAEL) stream to guide the generated pseudo-word tokens obtained by ILGL explicitly aligned with pedestrian attributes, which can effectively align the pseudo-word tokens with the attribute concepts in the text embedding space. Extensive experiments show that JGEL has significant advantages in improving the performance of PAR and the challenging zero-shot PAR task.
M3SR: Multi-Scale Multi-Perceptual Mamba for Efficient Spectral Reconstruction
Authors: Yuze Zhang; Lingjie Li; Qiuzhen Lin; Zhong Ming; Fei Yu; Victor C. M. Leung
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The Mamba architecture has been widely applied to various low-level vision tasks due to its exceptional adaptability and strong performance. Although the Mamba architecture has been adopted for spectral reconstruction, it still faces the following two challenges: (1) Single spatial perception limits the ability to fully understand and analyze hyperspectral images; (2) Single-scale feature extraction struggles to capture the complex structures and fine details present in hyperspectral images. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale, multi-perceptual Mamba architecture for the spectral reconstruction task, called M3SR. Specifically, we design a multi-perceptual fusion block to enhance the ability of the model to comprehensively understand and analyze the input features. By integrating the multi-perceptual fusion block into a U-Net structure, M3SR can effectively extract and fuse global, intermediate, and local features, thereby enabling accurate reconstruction of hyperspectral images at multiple scales. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed M3SR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods while incurring a lower computational cost.
InstructDubber: Instruction-based Alignment for Zero-shot Movie Dubbing
Authors: Zhedong Zhang; Liang Li; Gaoxiang Cong; Chunshan Liu; Yuhan Gao; Xiaowan Wang; Tao Gu; Yuankai Qi
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Movie dubbing seeks to synthesize speech from a given script using a specific voice, while ensuring accurate lip synchronization and emotion-prosody alignment with the character’s visual performance. However, existing alignment approaches based on visual features face two key limitations: (1) they rely on complex, handcrafted visual preprocessing pipelines, including facial landmark detection and feature extraction; and (2) they generalize poorly to unseen visual domains, often resulting in degraded alignment and dubbing quality. To address these issues, we propose InstructDubber, a novel instruction-based alignment dubbing method for both robust in-domain and zero-shot movie dubbing. Specifically, we first feed the video, script, and corresponding prompts into a multimodal large language model to generate natural language dubbing instructions regarding the speaking rate and emotion state depicted in the video, which is robust to visual domain variations. Second, we design an instructed duration distilling module to mine discriminative duration cues from speaking rate instructions to predict lip-aligned phoneme-level pronunciation duration. Third, for emotion-prosody alignment, we devise an instructed emotion calibrating module, which fine-tunes an LLM-based instruction analyzer using ground truth dubbing emotion as supervision and predicts prosody based on the calibrated emotion analysis. Finally, the predicted duration and prosody, together with the script, are fed into the audio decoder to generate video-aligned dubbing. Extensive experiments on three major benchmarks demonstrate that InstructDubber outperforms state‑of‑the‑art approaches across both in‑domain and zero‑shot scenarios.