GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MedEyes: Learning Dynamic Visual Focus for Medical Progressive Diagnosis
Authors: Chunzheng Zhu; Yangfang Lin; Shen Chen; Yijun Wang; Jianxin Lin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Accurate medical diagnosis often involves progressive visual focusing and iterative reasoning, characteristics commonly observed in clinical workflows. While recent vision-language models demonstrate promising chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), their purely on-policy learning paradigm tends to reinforce superficially coherent but clinically inaccurate reasoning paths. We propose MedEyes, a novel reinforcement learning framework that dynamically models clinician-style diagnostic reasoning by progressively attending to and interpreting relevant medical image regions. By incorporating off-policy expert guidance, MedEyes converts expert visual search trajectories into structured external behavioral signals, guiding the model toward clinically aligned visual reasoning. We design the Gaze-guided Reasoning Navigator (GRN) to emulate the diagnostic process through a dual-mode exploration strategy, scanning for systematic abnormality localization and drilling for detailed regional analysis. To balance expert imitation and autonomous discovery, we introduce the Confidence Value Sampler (CVS), which employs nucleus sampling and adaptive termination to create diverse yet credible exploration paths. Finally, the dual-stream GRPO optimization framework decouples on-policy and off-policy learning signals, mitigating reward assimilation and entropy collapse. Experiments demonstrate that MedEyes achieves an average performance improvement of +8.5% across multiple medical VQA benchmarks, validating MedEyes's potential in building trustworthy medical AI systems.
Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Automotive LiDAR Object Detection
Authors: Haoran Zhu; Zhenyuan Dong; Kristi Topollai; Beiyao Sha; Anna Ewa Choromanska
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recently, self‑supervised representation learning relying on vast amounts of unlabeled data has been explored as a pre‑training method for autonomous driving. However, directly applying popular contrastive or generative methods to this problem is insufficient and may even lead to negative transfer. In this paper, we present AD‑L‑JEPA, a novel self‑supervised pre‑training framework with a joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for automotive LiDAR object detection. Unlike existing methods, AD‑L‑JEPA is neither generative nor contrastive. Instead of explicitly generating masked regions, our method predicts Bird’s‑Eye‑View embeddings to capture the diverse nature of driving scenes. Furthermore, our approach eliminates the need to manually form contrastive pairs by employing explicit variance regularization to avoid representation collapse. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements on the LiDAR 3D object detection downstream task across the KITTI3D, Waymo, and ONCE datasets, while reducing GPU hours by 1.9×–2.7× and GPU memory by 2.8×–4× compared with the state-of-the-art method Occupancy-MAE. Notably, on the largest ONCE dataset, pre‑training on 100K frames yields a 1.61 mAP gain, better than in case of all the other methods pre‑trained on either 100K or 500K frames, and pre‑training on 500K frames yields a 2.98 mAP gain, better than in case of all the other methods pre‑trained on either 500K or 1M frames. AD‑L‑JEPA constitutes the first JEPA‑based pre‑training method for autonomous driving. It offers better quality, faster, and more GPU‑memory‑efficient self‑supervised representation learning.
Other Vehicle Trajectories Are Also Needed: A Driving World Model Unifies Ego-Other Vehicle Trajectories in Video Latent Space
Authors: Jian Zhu; Zhengyu Jia; Tian Gao; Jiaxin Deng; Shidi Li; Lang Zhang; Fu Liu; Peng Jia; Xianpeng Lang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Advanced end-to-end autonomous driving systems predict other vehicles' motions and plan ego vehicle's trajectory. The world model that can foresee the outcome of the trajectory has been used to evaluate the end-to-end autonomous driving system. However, existing world models predominantly emphasize the trajectory of the ego vehicle and leave other vehicles uncontrollable. This limitation hinders their ability to realistically simulate the interaction between the ego vehicle and the driving scenario. In addition, it remains a challenge to match multiple trajectories with each vehicle in the video to control the video generation. To address above issues, a driving World Model named EOT-WM is proposed in this paper, unifying Ego-Other vehicle Trajectories in videos. Specifically, we first project ego and other vehicle trajectories in the BEV space into the image coordinate to match each trajectory with its corresponding vehicle in the video.
Then, trajectory videos are encoded by the Spatial-Temporal Variational Auto Encoder to align with driving video latents spatially and temporally in the unified visual space. A trajectory-injected diffusion Transformer is further designed to denoise the noisy video latents for video generation with the guidance of ego-other vehicle trajectories. In addition, we propose a metric based on control latent similarity to evaluate the controllability of trajectories. Extensive experiments are conducted on the nuScenes dataset, and the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 30% in FID and 55% in FVD. The model can also predict unseen driving scenes with self-produced trajectories.
AnchorDS: Anchoring Dynamic Sources for Semantically Consistent Text-to-3D Generation
Authors: Jiayin Zhu; Linlin Yang; Yicong Li; Angela Yao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Optimization‐based text‑to‑3D methods distill guidance from 2D generative models via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), but implicitly treat this guidance as static. This work shows that ignoring source dynamics yields inconsistent trajectories that suppress or merge semantic cues, leading to "semantic over-smoothing" artifacts. As such, we reformulate text‑to‑3D optimization as mapping a *dynamically evolving source* distribution to a fixed target distribution.  We cast the problem into a dual‑conditioned latent space, conditioned on both the text prompt and the intermediately rendered image. Given this joint setup, we observe that the image condition naturally anchors the current source distribution. Building on this insight, we introduce AnchorDS, an improved score distillation mechanism that provides state‑anchored guidance with image conditions and stabilizes generation. We further penalize erroneous source estimates and design a lightweight filter strategy and fine‑tuning strategy that refines the anchor with negligible overhead. AnchorDS produces finer-grained detail, more natural colours, and stronger semantic consistency, particularly for complex prompts, while maintaining efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses previous methods in both quality and efficiency.
LENS: Learning to Segment Anything with Unified Reinforced Reasoning
Authors: Lianghui Zhu; Bin Ouyang; Yuxuan Zhang; Tianheng Cheng; Rui Hu; Haocheng Shen; Longjin Ran; Xiaoxin Chen; Li Yu; Wenyu Liu; Xinggang Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-prompted image segmentation enables fine-grained visual understanding and is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and robotics. However, existing supervised fine-tuning methods typically ignore explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning at test time, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen prompts and domains. To address this issue, we introduce LENS, a scalable reinforcement-learning framework that jointly optimizes the reasoning process and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. We propose unified reinforcement-learning rewards that span sentence-, box-, and segment-level cues, encouraging the model to generate informative CoT rationales while refining mask quality. Using a publicly available 3-billion-parameter vision–language model, i.e., Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, LENS achieves an average cIoU of 81.2% on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks, outperforming the strong fine-tuned method, i.e., GLaMM, by up to 5.6%. These results demonstrate that RL-driven CoT reasoning significantly enhances text-prompted segmentation and offers a practical path toward more generalizable Segment Anything models (SAM).
Class Incremental Medical Image Segmentation via Prototype-Guided Calibration and Dual-Aligned Distillation
Authors: Shengqian Zhu; Chengrong Yu; Qiang Wang; Ying Song; Guangjun Li; Jiafei Wu; Xiaogang Xu; Zhang Yi; Junjie Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Class incremental medical image segmentation (CIMIS) aims to preserve knowledge of previously learned classes while learning new ones without relying on old-class annotations. However, existing methods 1) either adopt one-size-fits-all strategies that treat all spatial regions and feature channels equally, which may hinder the preservation of accurate old knowledge, 2) or focus solely on aligning local prototypes with global ones for old classes while overlooking their local representations in new data, leading to knowledge degradation. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Prototype-Guided Calibration Distillation (PGCD) and Dual-Aligned Prototype Distillation (DAPD) for CIMIS in this paper. Specifically, PGCD exploits prototype-to-feature similarity to calibrate class-specific distillation intensity in different spatial regions, effectively reinforcing reliable old knowledge and suppressing misleading cues from old classes. Complementarily, DAPD aligns the local prototypes of old classes extracted from the current model with both global historical prototypes and local prototypes, further enhancing segmentation performance on old categories. Comprehensive evaluations on two widely used multi-organ segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.
Graph-Driven Domain Co-Adaptation for Cross-Domain Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Shun Zhu; Xichen Yang; Yan Zhang; Tianshu Wang; Zhongyuan Mao; Tianyin Li; Zhuoyan Sun; Xiaobo Shen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As a typical information medium, images are widely utilized across various scenarios. Measuring image quality accurately is meaningful for the subsequent usability of images. However, significant variations exist in image types and distortion types in different scenarios. And, acquiring labeled images for each specific scenario is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Consequently, designing cross-domain image quality assessment (IQA) that generalizes across different scenarios remains a substantial challenge. Existing cross-domain IQA methods primarily focus on content relevance while neglecting distortion differences, leading to limited applicability while distortion fluctuates. To address these limitations, a graph-driven domain co-adaptation framework for cross-domain IQA (GDCIQA) is proposed. Firstly, a graph knowledge sharing (GKS) module that constructs graphs via inter-domain distortion relevance has been proposed. GKS employs graph neural networks to update quality-aware features in the source domain by leveraging target-domain representations. Secondly, the proposed co-adaptation learning (CAL) mechanism can enable joint optimization of different modules, which ensures comprehensive sharing of quality-aware and distortion-related information. Finally, a domain adaptation framework has been designed to train models effectively on labeled source images, yielding target-domain-optimized IQA models. Experimental results demonstrate that GDCIQA achieves higher accuracy and stability in cross-domain scenarios. The proposed GKS and CAL can advance cross-domain IQA research.
VTD-CLIP: Video-to-Text Discretization via Prompting CLIP
Authors: Wencheng Zhu; Yuexin Wang; Hongxuan Li; Pengfei Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Vision-language models bridge visual and linguistic understanding and have proven to be powerful for video recognition tasks. Existing methods primarily rely on parameter-efficient fine-tuning of pre-trained image-text models, suffering from limited interpretability and poor generalization due to inadequate temporal modeling. To address these, we propose a simple yet effective video-to-text discretization framework. Our approach leverages the frozen text encoder to build a visual codebook derived from video class labels, exploiting the many-to-one contrastive alignment between visual and textual embeddings in multimodal pretraining. This enables the transformation of temporal visual features into discrete textual tokens via feature lookups, yielding interpretable video representations through explicit video modeling. Then, to improve robustness against noisy or irrelevant frames, we introduce a confidence-aware fusion module that dynamically weights keyframes based on their semantic relevance, as measured by the codebook. Furthermore, we incorporate learnable text prompts to conduct adaptive codebook updates during training. Experiments on four datasets, including HMDB-51, UCF-101, Something-Something-v2, and Kinetics-400, validate the superiority of our approach,  achieving competitive improvements over state-of-the-art approaches.
SLCFormer: Spectral-Local Context Transformer with Physics-Grounded Flare Synthesis for Nighttime Flare Removal
Authors: Xiyu Zhu; Wei Wang; Xin Yuan; Xiao Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Lens flare is a common nighttime artifact caused by strong light sources scattering within camera lenses, leading to hazy streaks, halos, and glare that degrade visual quality. However, existing methods usually fail to effectively address nonuniform scattered flares, which severely reduces their applicability to complex real-world scenarios with diverse lighting conditions.To address this issue, we propose SLCFormer, a novel spectral-local context transformer framework for effective nighttime lens flare removal. SLCFormer integrates two key modules: the Frequency Fourier and Excitation Module (FFEM), which captures efficient global contextual representations in the frequency domain to model flare characteristics, and the Directionally-Enhanced Spatial Module (DESM) for local structural enhancement and directional features in the spatial domain for precise flare removal. Furthermore, we introduce a ZernikeVAE-based scatter flare generation pipeline to synthesize physically realistic scatter flares with spatially varying PSFs, bridging optical physics and data-driven training. Extensive experiments on the Flare7K++ dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing approaches in both quantitative metrics and perceptual visual quality, and generalizing robustly to real nighttime scenes with complex flare artifacts.
CapeNext: Rethinking and Refining Dynamic Support Information for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation
Authors: Yu Zhu; Dan Zeng; Shuiwang Li; Qijun Zhao; Qiaomu Shen; Bo Tang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent research in Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) has adopted fixed textual keypoint description as semantic prior for two-stage pose matching frameworks. While this paradigm enhances robustness and flexibility by disentangling the dependency of support images, our critical analysis reveals two inherent limitations of static joint embedding: (1) polysemy-induced cross-category ambiguity during the matching process(e.g., the concept "leg" exhibiting divergent visual manifestations across humans and furniture), and (2) insufficient discriminability for fine-grained intra-category variations (e.g., posture and fur discrepancies between a sleeping white cat and a standing black cat). To overcome these challenges, we propose a new framework that innovatively integrates hierarchical cross-modal interaction with dual-stream feature refinement, enhancing the joint embedding with both class-level and instance-specific cues from textual description and specific images. Experiments on the MP-100 dataset demonstrate that, regardless of the network backbone, CapeNext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CAPE methods by a large margin.
Pixel-level Quality Assessment for Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Yunhui Zhu; Buliao Huang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Modern oriented object detectors typically predict a set of bounding boxes and select the top-ranked ones based on estimated localization quality. Achieving high detection performance requires that the estimated quality closely aligns with the actual localization accuracy. To this end, existing approaches predict the Intersection over Union (IoU) between the predicted and ground-truth (GT) boxes as a proxy for localization quality. However, box-level IoU prediction suffers from a structural coupling issue: since the predicted box is derived from the detector’s internal estimation of the GT box, the predicted IoU—based on their similarity—can be overestimated for poorly localized boxes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Pixel-level Quality Assessment (PQA) framework, which replaces box-level IoU prediction with the integration of pixel-level spatial consistency. PQA measures the alignment between each pixel’s relative position to the predicted box and its corresponding position to the GT box. By operating at the pixel level, PQA avoids directly comparing the predicted box with the estimated GT box, thereby eliminating the inherent similarity bias in box-level IoU prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a new integration metric that aggregates pixel-level spatial consistency into a unified quality score, yielding a more accurate approximation of the actual localization quality. Extensive experiments on HRSC2016 and DOTA demonstrate that PQA can be seamlessly integrated into various oriented object detectors, consistently improving performance (e.g., +5.96% AP50:95 on Rotated RetinaNet and +2.32% on STD).
SinBasis Networks: Matrix-Equivalent Feature Extraction for Wave-Like Optical Spectrograms
Authors: Yuzhou Zhu; Zheng Zhang; Ruyi Zhang; Liang Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Wave-like images—from attosecond streaking spectrograms to optical spectra, audio mel-spectrograms and periodic video frames—encode critical harmonic structures that elude conventional feature extractors. We propose a unified, matrix-equivalent framework that reinterprets convolution and attention as linear transforms on flattened inputs, revealing filter weights as basis vectors spanning latent feature subspaces. To infuse spectral priors we apply elementwise sin(·) mappings to each weight matrix. Embedding these transforms into CNN, ViT and Capsule architectures yields Sin-Basis Networks with heightened sensitivity to periodic motifs and built-in invariance to spatial shifts. Experiments on a diverse collection of wave-like image datasets—including 80,000 synthetic attosecond streaking spectrograms, thousands of Raman, photoluminescence and FTIR spectra, mel-spectrograms from AudioSet and cycle-pattern frames from Kinetics—demonstrate substantial gains in reconstruction accuracy, translational robustness and zero-shot cross-domain transfer. Theoretical analysis via matrix isomorphism and Mercer-kernel truncation quantifies how sinusoidal reparametrization enriches expressivity while preserving stability in data-scarce regimes. Sin-Basis Networks thus offer a lightweight, physics-informed approach to deep learning across all wave-form imaging modalities.
Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory
Authors: Zhengtong Zhu; Jiaqing Fan; Zhixuan Liu; Fanzhang Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (ReasonVOS) is a challenging task that requires stable object segmentation across video sequences using implicit and complex textual inputs. Previous methods fine-tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce segmentation outputs, which demand substantial resources. Additionally, some existing methods are coupled in the processing of spatio-temporal information, which affects the temporal stability of the model to some extent. To address these issues, we propose Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory (SDAM). We aim to design a training-free reasoning video segmentation framework that outperforms existing methods requiring fine-tuning, using only pre-trained models. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Object Memory module that selects and memorizes key objects based on motion cues in different video sequences. Finally, we propose Spatio-temporal Decoupling for stable temporal propagation. In the spatial domain, we achieve precise localization and segmentation of target objects, while in the temporal domain, we leverage key object temporal information to drive stable cross-frame propagation. Our method achieves excellent results on five benchmark datasets, including Ref-YouTubeVOS, Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, ReasonVOS, and ReVOS.
Q Cache: Visual Attention Is Valuable in Less than Half of Decode Layers for Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Jiedong Zhuang; Lu Lu; Ming Dai; Rui Hu; Jian Chen; Qiang Liu; Haoji Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and key-value (KV) cache footprint bottleneck. Existing approaches focus on token-wise optimization, leveraging diverse intricate token pruning techniques to eliminate non-crucial visual tokens. Nevertheless, these methods often unavoidably undermine the integrity of the KV cache, resulting in failures in long-text generation tasks. To this end, we conduct an in-depth investigation towards the attention mechanism of the model from a new perspective, and discern that attention within more than half of all decode layers are semantic similar. Upon this finding, we contend that the attention in certain layers can be streamlined by inheriting the attention from their preceding layers. Consequently, we propose Lazy Attention, an efficient attention mechanism that enables cross-layer sharing of similar attention patterns.
It ingeniously reduces layer-wise redundant computation in attention. In Lazy Attention, we develop a novel layer-shared cache, Q Cache, tailored for MLLMs, which facilitates the reuse of queries across adjacent layers. In particular, Q Cache is lightweight and fully compatible with existing inference frameworks, including Flash Attention and KV cache. Additionally, our method is highly flexible as it is orthogonal to existing token-wise techniques and can be deployed independently or combined with token pruning approaches. Empirical evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method can reduce KV cache usage by over 35% and achieve 1.5x throughput improvement, while sacrificing only approximately 1% of performance on various MLLMs. Compared with SOTA token-wise methods, our technique achieves superior accuracy preservation.