GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thoughts for Robotic Manipulation with Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Model
Authors: Xiang Li; Ya-Li Li; Yuan Wang; Huaqiang Wang; Shengjin Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models
have demonstrated impressive generalization for robotic manipulation.
However, these models often operate by directly mapping visual and linguistic inputs to subsequent actions, lacking intermediate task planning, along with failure detection and recovery ability.
These limitations prevent them from effectively decomposing complex tasks, recognizing problems, and correcting erroneous actions, ultimately resulting in complete task failure. This significantly hinders their ability to perform long-horizon tasks and generalization ability.
To this end, we introduce TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thought, a unified VLA framework that enhances this direct mapping with trajectory planning as well as failure detection and recovery.
TCoT leverages hierarchy trajectories as a precise and compact representation of CoT reasoning for manipulation: global planning provides a high-level, goal-oriented trajectory to guide the robot toward its task objective, while local planning focuses on real-time adjustments to address dynamic changes.
Moreover, we designed the Global-Local Switching Recovery algorithm that detects and effectively recovers from failures. 
Experimental results reveal that TCoT surpasses the state-of-the-art methods across both real and simulated scenarios and exhibits superior generalization capabilities.
HDRMovieformer: A Transformer Framework and Benchmark for Cinematic SDR-to-HDR Conversion
Authors: Xianwei Li; Huiyuan Fu; Chuanming Wang; Huadong Ma
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the growing prevalence of HDR-capable cinema venues such as Cinity LED theaters, there is an increasing demand to convert existing Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) films into High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats for theatrical presentation. However, existing SDR-to-HDR conversion methods are primarily tailored for consumer-grade content such as television and therefore fall short of the stringent requirements of professional cinematic material. To bridge this gap, we present HDRMovie7K, the first large-scale, lossless dataset of cinematic SDR-HDR frame pairs sourced from professional Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) workflows. Based on this foundation, we introduce HDRMovieformer, a transformer-based framework featuring a Luminance Estimator module for luminance guidance, a Luminance-Guided Multi-Head Self-Attention to focus on critical fine-detail recovery, and a Chroma Refiner for color accuracy, optimized with a novel Wide Color Gamut Loss. To further evaluate our model in online streaming media scenarios, we introduce HDRMovie1K, a dataset curated from publicly available HDR film clips. Extensive experiments on both HDRMovie7K and HDRMovie1K demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Multi-Level Blur-Aware Stable Diffusion for Region-Adaptive Defocus Deblurring
Authors: Xiaopan Li; Yi Jiang; Shiqian Wu; Shoulie Xie; Sos Agaian
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Defocus blur, common in shallow depth-of-field photography, varies across image regions and is challenging to accurately estimate and restore. Existing deblurring methods often struggle to capture fine structural textures and do not effectively adapt to regional differences in blur. We propose Multi-Level Blur-Aware Stable Diffusion (MBSD), a novel framework that explicitly integrates regional blur recognition into a diffusion-based image restoration process. MBSD assigns blur-level labels to image patches using a Patch Blur Annotator (PBA), guiding a Multi-Scale Blur Estimator (MSBE) to predict soft blur probabilities and generate routing weights. These weights control a Blur-Adaptive Expert Mixer (BAEM), which adaptively combines features based on local blur severity. The features are then passed to a text-to-image diffusion model via a  cross-attention mechanism, enabling region-specific restoration. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that MBSD delivers superior perceptual quality while maintaining competitive PSNR and SSIM, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Rethinking the Spatio-Temporal Alignment of End-to-End 3D Perception
Authors: Xiaoyu Li; Peidong Li; Xian Wu; Long Shi; Dedong Liu; Yitao Wu; Jiajia Fu; Dixiao Cui; Lijun Zhao; Lining Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spatio-temporal alignment is crucial for temporal modeling of end-to-end (E2E) perception in autonomous driving (AD), providing valuable structural and textural prior information. Existing methods typically rely on the attention mechanism to align objects across frames, simplifying the motion model with a unified explicit physical model (constant velocity, etc.).  These approaches prefer semantic features for implicit alignment, challenging the importance of explicit motion modeling in the traditional perception paradigm. However, variations in motion states and object features across categories and frames render this alignment suboptimal. To address this, we propose HAT, a spatio-temporal alignment module that allows each object to adaptively decode the optimal alignment proposal from multiple hypotheses without direct supervision. Specifically, HAT first utilizes multiple explicit motion models to generate spatial anchors and motion-aware feature proposals for historical instances. It then performs multi-hypothesis decoding by incorporating semantic and motion cues embedded in cached object queries, ultimately providing the optimal alignment proposal for the target frame. On nuScenes, HAT consistently improves 3D temporal detectors and trackers across diverse baselines. It achieves state-of-the-art tracking results with 46.0% AMOTA on the test set when paired with the DETR3D detector. In an object-centric E2E AD method, HAT enhances perception accuracy (+1.3% mAP, +3.1% AMOTA) and reduces the collision rate by 32%. When semantics are corrupted (nuScenes-C), the enhancement of motion modeling by HAT enables more robust perception and planning in the E2E AD.
Text-Guided Channel Perturbation and Pre-Trained Knowledge Integration for Unified Multi-Modality Image Fusion
Authors: Xilai Li; Xiaosong Li; Weijun Jiang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-modality image fusion enhances scene perception by combining complementary information. Unified models aim to share parameters across modalities for multi-modality image fusion, but large modality differences often cause gradient conflicts, limiting performance. Some methods introduce modality-specific encoders to enhance feature perception and improve fusion quality. However, this strategy reduces generalisation across different fusion tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a unified multi-modality image fusion framework based on channel perturbation and pre-trained knowledge integration (UP-Fusion). To suppress redundant modal information and emphasize key features, we propose the Semantic-Aware Channel Pruning Module (SCPM), which leverages the semantic perception capability of a pre-trained model to filter and enhance multi-modality feature channels. Furthermore, we proposed the Geometric Affine Modulation Module (GAM), which uses original modal features to apply affine transformations on initial fusion features to maintain the feature encoder modal discriminability. Finally, we apply a Text-Guided Channel Perturbation Module (TCPM) during decoding to reshape the channel distribution, reducing the dependence on modality-specific channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods on both multi-modality image fusion and downstream tasks.
CausalStep: A Benchmark for Explicit Stepwise Causal Reasoning in Videos
Authors: Xuchen Li; Xuzhao Li; Shiyu Hu; Kaiqi Huang; Wentao Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved reasoning in text and image domains, yet achieving robust video reasoning remains a significant challenge. Existing video benchmarks mainly assess shallow understanding and reasoning and allow models to exploit global context, failing to rigorously evaluate true causal and stepwise reasoning. We present CausalStep, a benchmark designed for explicit stepwise causal reasoning in videos. CausalStep segments videos into causally linked units and enforces a strict stepwise question-answer (QA) protocol, requiring sequential answers and preventing shortcut solutions. Each question includes carefully constructed distractors based on error type taxonomy to ensure diagnostic value. The benchmark features 100 videos across six categories and 1,852 multiple-choice QA pairs. We introduce seven diagnostic metrics for comprehensive evaluation, enabling precise diagnosis of causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments with leading proprietary and open-source models, as well as human baselines, reveal a significant gap between current models and human-level stepwise reasoning. CausalStep provides a rigorous benchmark to drive progress in robust and interpretable video reasoning.
Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensing
Authors: Xuyang Li; Chenyu Li; Danfeng Hong
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Optical satellites, with their diverse band layouts and ground sampling distances, supply indispensable evidence for tasks ranging from ecosystem surveillance to emergency response. However, significant discrepancies in band composition and spatial resolution across different optical sensors present major challenges for existing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs). These models are typically pretrained on fixed band configurations and resolutions, making them vulnerable to real world scenarios involving missing bands, cross sensor fusion, and unseen spatial scales, thereby limiting their generalization and practical deployment.
To address these limitations, we propose Any Optical Model (AOM), a universal RSFM explicitly designed to accommodate arbitrary band compositions, sensor types, and resolution scales. To preserve distinctive spectral characteristics even when bands are missing or newly introduced, AOM introduces a spectrum-independent tokenizer that assigns each channel a dedicated band embedding, enabling explicit encoding of spectral identity. To effectively capture texture and contextual patterns from sub-meter to hundred-meter imagery, we design a multi-scale adaptive patch embedding mechanism that dynamically modulates the receptive field. Furthermore, to maintain global semantic consistency across varying resolutions, AOM incorporates a multi-scale semantic alignment mechanism alongside a channel-wise self-supervised masking and reconstruction pretraining strategy that jointly models spectral-spatial relationships.
Extensive experiments on over 10 public datasets, including those from Sentinel-2, Landsat, and HLS, demonstrate that AOM consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under challenging conditions such as band missing, cross sensor, and cross resolution settings. These results highlight AOM as a crucial step toward building truly general-purpose RSFMs.
RiemanLine: Riemannian Manifold Representation of 3D Lines for Factor Graph Optimization
Authors: Yan Li; Ze Yang; Keisuke Tateno; Federico Tombari; Liang Zhao; Gim Hee Lee
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Minimal parametrization of 3D lines plays a critical role in camera localization and structural mapping. Existing representations in robotics and computer vision predominantly handle independent lines, overlooking structural regularities such as sets of parallel lines that are pervasive in man-made environments. This paper introduces RiemanLine, a unified minimal representation for 3D lines formulated on Riemannian manifolds that jointly accommodates both individual lines and parallel-line groups. 
Our key idea is to decouple each line landmark into global and local components: a shared vanishing direction optimized on the unit sphere, and scaled normal vectors constrained on orthogonal subspaces, enabling compact encoding of structural regularities. For n parallel lines, the proposed representation reduces the parameter space from 4n (orthonormal form) to 2n+2, naturally embedding parallelism without explicit constraints. We further integrate this parameterization into a factor graph framework, allowing global direction alignment and local reprojection optimization within a unified manifold-based bundle adjustment. Extensive experiments on ICL-NUIM, TartanAir, and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significantly more accurate pose estimation and line reconstruction, while reducing parameter dimensionality and improving convergence stability.
Active3D: Active High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction via Multi-Level Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Yan Li; Yingzhao Li; Gim Hee Lee
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we present an active exploration framework for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction that incrementally builds a multi-level uncertainty space and selects next-best-views through an uncertainty-driven motion planner. 
We introduce a hybrid implicit–explicit representation that fuses neural fields with Gaussian primitives to jointly capture global structural priors and locally observed details. Based on this hybrid state, we derive a hierarchical uncertainty volume that quantifies both implicit global structure quality and explicit local surface confidence. To focus optimization on the most informative regions, we propose an uncertainty-driven keyframe selection strategy that anchors high-entropy viewpoints as sparse attention nodes, coupled with a viewpoint-space sliding window for uncertainty-aware local refinement. The planning module formulates next-best-view selection as an Expected Hybrid Information Gain problem and incorporates a risk-sensitive path planner to ensure efficient and safe exploration. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, completeness, and rendering quality, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world active reconstruction and robotic perception tasks.
HiFi-Mesh: High-Fidelity Efficient 3D Mesh Generation via Compact Autoregressive Dependence
Authors: Yanfeng Li; Tao Tan; Qinquan Gao; Zhiwen Cao; Xiaohong Liu; Yue Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-fidelity 3D meshes can be tokenized into one-dimension (1D) sequences and directly modeled using autoregressive approaches for faces and vertices. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient resource utilization, resulting in slow inference and the ability to handle only small-scale sequences, which severely constrains the expressible structural details.
We introduce the Latent Autoregressive Network (LANE), which incorporates compact autoregressive dependencies in the generation process, achieving a 6× improvement in maximum generatable sequence length compared to existing methods. 
To further accelerate inference, we propose the Adaptive Computation Graph Reconfiguration (AdaGraph) strategy, which effectively overcomes the efficiency bottleneck of traditional serial inference through spatiotemporal decoupling in the generation process.
Experimental validation demonstrates that LANE achieves superior performance across generation speed, structural detail, and geometric consistency, providing an effective solution for high-quality 3D mesh generation.
Not All Distortions Are Created Equal: Distortion-Selective Domain Adaptation for Point Cloud Quality Assessment
Authors: Yangwei Li; Xiaochuan Wang; Xin Shang; Haisheng Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has advanced significantly with synthetic datasets offering diverse distortion coverage for model training. However, when applied to new application scenarios, models often suffer from performance drops due to mismatched distortion characteristics between source and target domains. Most current methods use all available synthetic distortions, which may introduce irrelevant features and hinder generalization. To address this, we propose DST-PCQA, a distortion-selective training framework for PCQA. Unlike previous approaches that treat all distortions equally, DST-PCQA identifies and selects distortion types most relevant to a target domain by analyzing inter-domain distortion similarity. This selective strategy reduces negative transfer and enables efficient domain-specific training. To fully leverage the selected distortions for both classification and quality prediction, we adopt a dual-branch architecture that fuses 2D visual cues and 3D geometric structure via cross-modal attention. This design supports multi-level feature alignment across modalities and enables fine-grained distortion understanding. Extensive evaluations across three target domains have verified the effectiveness of DST-PCQA over full-set training baselines. Moreover, its distortion-selective strategy is orthogonal to existing model-based PCQA methods, enabling improved cross-domain performance and reduced training costs across a wide range of architectures.
IAD-R1: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Industrial Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yanhui Li; Yunkang Cao; Chengliang Liu; Yuan Xiong; Xinghui Dong; Chao Huang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing, yet the scarcity of defective samples restricts traditional detection methods to scenario-specific applications. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in generalization capabilities, their performance in industrial anomaly detection remains limited. To address this challenge, we propose IAD-R1, a universal post-training framework applicable to VLMs of different architectures and parameter scales, which substantially enhances their anomaly detection capabilities. IAD-R1 employs a two-stage training strategy: the Perception Activation Supervised Fine-Tuning (PA-SFT) stage utilizes a meticulously constructed high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset (Expert-AD) for training, enhancing anomaly perception capabilities and establishing reasoning-to-answer correlations; the Structured Control Group Relative Policy Optimization (SC-GRPO) stage employs carefully designed reward functions to achieve a capability leap from "Anomaly Perception" to "Anomaly Interpretation". Experimental results demonstrate that IAD-R1 achieves significant improvements across 7 VLMs, the largest improvement was on the DAGM dataset, with average accuracy 43.3% higher than the 0.5B baseline. Notably, the 0.5B parameter model trained with IAD-R1 surpasses commercial models including GPT-4.1 and Claude-Sonnet-4 in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of IAD-R1.
EgoCross: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering
Authors: Yanjun Li; Yuqian Fu; Tianwen Qian; Qi'Ao Xu; Silong Dai; Danda Pani Paudel; Luc Van Gool; Xiaoling Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly pushed the frontier of egocentric video question answering (EgocentricQA). However, existing benchmarks and studies are mainly limited to common daily activities such as cooking and cleaning. In contrast, real-world deployment inevitably encounters domain shifts, where target domains differ substantially in both visual style and semantic content. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoCross, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-domain generalization of MLLMs in EgocentricQA. EgoCross covers four diverse and challenging domains, including surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective, representing realistic and high-impact application scenarios. It comprises approximately 1,000 QA pairs across 798 video clips, spanning four key QA tasks: prediction, recognition, localization, and counting. Each QA pair provides both OpenQA and CloseQA formats to support fine-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most existing MLLMs, whether general-purpose or egocentric-specialized, struggle to generalize to domains beyond daily life, highlighting the limitations of current models. Furthermore, we conduct several pilot studies, e.g., fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to explore potential improvements. We hope EgoCross and our accompanying analysis will serve as a foundation for advancing domain-adaptive, robust egocentric video understanding.
From Scene to Object: Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection via Foreground-Background Context Reasoning
Authors: Yanqi Li; Jianwei Niu; Ningbo Gu; Tao Ren
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect both known and novel categories in complex visual scenes, surpassing the limitations of conventional closed-set detectors. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have enabled zero-shot recognition by aligning visual features with large-scale textual embeddings. However, current OVOD approaches often fall short by overlooking critical contextual and semantic cues necessary for discovering a broader range of novel objects. To address this, we propose BFDet, a scene-to-object reasoning framework that leverages the complementary strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) and VLMs. BFDet introduces a novel scene-to-object reasoning mechanism grounded in foreground-background context interaction. It first uses high-confidence objects to infer the scene-level background. This scene background then guides the discovery of foreground objects by prompting an LLM to generate scene-sensitive novel object candidates. These candidates are subsequently verified through cross-modal alignment and used as high-quality pseudo-labels to enrich detector training. Designed as a plug-and-play module, BFDet integrates seamlessly into existing detection pipelines and consistently improves performance on novel categories across COCO and LVIS benchmarks.
Make LVLMs Focus: Context-Aware Attention Modulation for Better Multimodal In-Context Learning
Authors: Yanshu Li; Jianjiang Yang; Ziteng Yang; Bozheng Li; Ligong Han; Hongyang He; Zhengtao Yao; Yingjie Victor Chen; Songlin Fei; Dongfang Liu; Ruixiang Tang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) is becoming a key capability that allows large vision-language models (LVLMs) to adapt to novel tasks without parameter updates, which expands their usefulness in many real-world applications. However, ICL performance remains unstable even when the in-context demonstrations (ICDs) are well matched, showing that LVLMs still struggle to make full use of the provided context. While existing work mainly focuses on prompt engineering or post-hoc logit calibration, we study the attention mechanisms inside LVLMs to address their inherent limitations. We identify two important weaknesses in their self-attention that hinder effective ICL. To address these weaknesses, we propose Context-Aware Modulated Attention (CAMA), a training-free and plug-and-play method that dynamically adjusts attention logits based on the input in-context sequence. CAMA uses a two-stage modulation process that strengthens attention to semantically important tokens, especially visual ones. Across four LVLMs and seven benchmarks, CAMA consistently outperforms vanilla models and baselines, showing clear effectiveness and generalization. It can also activate the intended benefits of prompt engineering methods and remains robust across different sequence configurations. Therefore, CAMA opens up new directions for improving multimodal reasoning through a deeper understanding of attention dynamics.