GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Human-Centric Open-Future Task Discovery: Formulation, Benchmark, and Scalable Tree-Based Search
Authors: Zijian Song; Xiaoxin Lin; Tao Pu; Zhenlong Yuan; Guangrun Wang; Liang Lin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent progress in robotics and embodied AI is largely driven by Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a key challenge remains underexplored: how can we advance LMMs to discover tasks that assist humans in open-future scenarios, where human intentions are highly concurrent and dynamic. In this work, we formalize the problem of Human-centric Open-future Task Discovery (HOTD), focusing particularly on identifying tasks that reduce human effort across plausible futures. To facilitate this study, we propose HOTD-Bench, which features over 2K real-world videos, a semi-automated annotation pipeline, and a simulation-based protocol tailored for open-set future evaluation. Additionally, we propose the Collaborative Multi-Agent Search Tree (CMAST) framework, which decomposes complex reasoning through a multi-agent system and structures the reasoning process through a scalable search tree module. In our experiments, CMAST achieves the best performance on the HOTD-Bench, significantly surpassing existing LMMs. It also integrates well with existing LMMs, consistently improving performance.
EEG-DLite: Dataset Distillation for Efficient Large EEG Model Training
Authors: Yuting Tang; Weibang Jiang; Shanglin Li; Yong Li; Chenyu Liu; Xinliang Zhou; Yi Ding; Cuntai Guan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large-scale EEG foundation models have shown strong generalization across a range of downstream tasks, but their training remains resource-intensive due to the volume and variable quality of EEG data. In this work, we introduce EEG-DLite, a data distillation framework that enables more efficient pre-training by selectively removing noisy and redundant samples from large EEG datasets. EEG-DLite begins by encoding EEG segments into compact latent representations using a self-supervised autoencoder, allowing sample selection to be performed efficiently and with reduced sensitivity to noise. Based on these representations, EEG-DLite filters out outliers and minimizes redundancy, resulting in a smaller yet informative subset that retains the diversity essential for effective foundation model training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that training on only 5 percent of a 2,500-hour dataset curated with EEG-DLite yields performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, training on the full dataset across multiple downstream tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of pre-training data distillation in the context of EEG foundation models. EEG-DLite provides a scalable and practical path toward more effective and efficient physiological foundation modeling.
AutoGameUI: Constructing High-Fidelity GameUI via Multimodal Correspondence Matching
Authors: Zhongliang Tang; Qingrong Cheng; Mengchen Tan; Yongxiang Zhang; Fei Xia
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Game UI development is essential to the game industry. However, the traditional workflow requires substantial manual effort to integrate pairwise UI and UX designs into a cohesive game user interface (GameUI). 
The inconsistency between the aesthetic UI design and the functional UX design typically results in mismatches and inefficiencies. To address the issue, we present an automatic system, AutoGameUI, for efficiently and accurately constructing GameUI. The system centers on a two-stage multimodal learning pipeline to obtain the optimal correspondences between UI and UX designs. The first stage learns the comprehensive representations of UI and UX designs from multimodal perspectives. The second stage incorporates grouped cross-attention modules with constrained integer programming to estimate the optimal correspondences through top-down hierarchical matching. The optimal correspondences enable the automatic GameUI construction. We create the GAMEUI dataset, comprising pairwise UI and UX designs from real-world games, to train and validate the proposed method. Besides, an interactive web tool is implemented to ensure high-fidelity effects and facilitate human-in-the-loop construction. Extensive experiments on the GAMEUI and RICO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in maintaining consistency between the constructed GameUI and the original designs. When deployed in the workflow of several mobile games, AutoGameUI achieves a 3× improvement in time efficiency, conveying significant practical value for game UI development.
Consensus-Driven Multi-Agent Cognitive Reasoning for Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models
Authors: Geng Tu; Dingming Li; Jun Huang; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in various NLP tasks but remain limited in emotional intelligence (EI). Benchmarks such as EmoBench attribute this gap to deficiencies in cognitively demanding tasks that require inferring others’ latent mental states, intentions, and emotions in nuanced social contexts. To address this, we propose MACRo, a Multi-Agent Cognitive Reasoning framework that generates a structured Cognitive Chain of Thought comprising Situation, Clue, Thought, Action, and Emotion. Each component is generated by a specialized agent, enabling modular, interpretable multi-step reasoning. To ensure coherence and mitigate hallucinations, a coordinator agent verifies outputs, and a consensus game mechanism enforces alignment across reasoning steps. Extensive Experiments on EmoBench show that MACRo significantly enhances both emotional understanding and application across LLMs. Further evaluations confirm its generalizability to real-world social applications such as emotional support conversations.
Inferring Implicit Goals Across Differing Task Models
Authors: Silvia Tulli; Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou; Mohamed CHETOUANI; Sarath Sreedharan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: One of the significant challenges to generating value-aligned behavior is to not only account for the specified user objectives but also any implicit or unspecified user requirements. The existence of such implicit requirements could be particularly common in settings where the user's understanding of the task model may differ from the agent's estimate of the model. Under this scenario, the user may incorrectly expect some agent behavior to be inevitable or guaranteed. This paper addresses such expectation mismatch in the presence of differing models by capturing the possibility of unspecified user subgoal in the context of a task captured as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and querying for it as required. Our method identifies bottleneck states and uses them as candidates for potential implicit subgoals. We then introduce a querying strategy that will generate the minimal number of queries required to identify a policy guaranteed to achieve the underlying goal. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in inferring and achieving unstated goals across various tasks.
Emotion-Conditioned Motion Sub-spaces with Flow Matching for Real-Time Audio-Driven Talking Heads
Authors: Haoyu Wang; Xiaozhe Xin; Xiaoyu Qin; Meiguang Jin; Junfeng Ma; Dan Xu; Jia Jia
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in audio-driven talking-head synthesis have brought lip-sync precision close to human perception, yet emotional fidelity and real-time inference remain open challenges.  Existing pipelines typically disentangle lip articulation, facial expression, and head pose in latent space; this rigid factorization ignores the intrinsic coupling between articulation and affect — e.g., downward lip corners when sad—thus limiting expressiveness.
We cast speech-conditioned facial motion as a sample from an emotion-conditioned distribution in a motion latent space.  Concretely, we (i) learn a motion dictionary of orthogonal bases with an autoencoder via self-supervision, (ii) construct emotion-conditioned sub-spaces within the latent space, and (iii) design a layer-progressive cross-attention fusion module that modulates a flow-matching sampler with both audio and emotion signals.  Only ten reverse ODE steps are required to generate a motion-latent trajectory, enabling real-time end-to-end latency.
Extensive experiments on MEAD and RAVDESS show that our method outperforms recent GAN- and diffusion-based baselines in emotion accuracy while running at around 75 FPS on a single desktop GPU. The proposed framework delivers the first emotionally expressive Audio2Face system that simultaneously achieves lip-sync accuracy, affective realism, and real-time performance.
Perceive More with Less: LiDAR Point Cloud Compression at Just Recognizable Distortion for 3D Scene Understanding
Authors: Miaohui Wang; Runnan Huang; Taojun Liu; Shuyuan Lin; Ye Liu; Yun Song
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing LiDAR point cloud (LPC) data coding methods primarily focus on balancing compression efficiency and reconstruction quality according to the human vision system (HVS). However, these methods rarely consider the requirements of downstream scene understanding tasks from the perspective of the machine vision system (MVS). To address this challenge, we explore the maximum degree of LPC compression that has negligible impact on perception accuracy, called LPC-based just recognizable compression distortion (lpcJRCD). Specifically, we introduce a novel point-wise quantization approach for constructing a MVS-based LiDAR dataset and present a new lpcJRCD-guided intelligent compression framework tailored for MVS applications. To enhance MVS-based LPC compression efficiency, we develop a dual-feature interaction (DFI) module that fuses point and voxel features. Additionally, we propose a mask-based loss function to ensure accurate point-wise quality level prediction. 
Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in reducing the average bit rate by up to 94.98% while preserving perception accuracy in autonomous vehicles.
New Synthetic Goldmine: Hand Joint Angle-Driven EMG Data Generation Framework for Micro-Gesture Recognition
Authors: Nana Wang; Suli Wang; Gen Li; Pengfei Ren; Hao Su
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Electromyography (EMG)-based gesture recognition has emerged as a promising approach for human-computer interaction. However, its performance is often limited by the scarcity of labeled EMG data, significant cross-user variability, and poor generalization to unseen gestures. To address these challenges, we propose SeqEMG-GAN, a conditional, sequence-driven generative framework that synthesizes high-fidelity EMG signals from hand joint angle sequences. Our method introduces a context-aware architecture composed of an angle encoder, a dual-layer context encoder featuring the novel Ang2Gist unit, a deep convolutional EMG generator, and a discriminator, all jointly optimized via adversarial learning. By conditioning on joint kinematic trajectories, SeqEMG-GAN is capable of generating semantically consistent EMG sequences, even for previously unseen gestures, thereby enhancing data diversity and physiological plausibility. Experimental results show that classifiers trained solely on synthetic data experience only a slight accuracy drop (from 57.77% to 55.71%). In contrast, training with a combination of real and synthetic data significantly improves accuracy to 60.53%, outperforming real-only training by 2.76%. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, also achieves the state-of-art performance in augmenting EMG datasets and enhancing gesture recognition performance for applications such as neural robotic hand control, AI/AR glasses, and gesture-based virtual gaming systems.
A Brain-Inspired Saliency Prediction Framework for Human-AI Cognitive Consistency in AIGC Content via Multi-Region Liquid Neurons
Authors: Shibo Wang; Yan Zhao; Shigang Wang; Jian Wei; Shuo Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In recent years, human-AI cognitive consistency has emerged as a crucial perspective for evaluating the perceptual quality and interpretability of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content). This paper proposes a biologically inspired saliency prediction framework that models six core regions of the human visual system—namely V1, V2, V4, MT, LIP, and FEF—using liquid neurons to capture the dynamic saliency features aligned with human gaze behavior. To enable effective alignment between AIGC models and human cognitive mechanisms, we introduce a cross-domain dual-teacher distillation strategy and construct a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising natural images, eye-tracking data, AIGC-generated images, and their corresponding cross-attention maps. Furthermore, we propose HAMCI (Human-AI Mutual Cognitive Index), a novel metric designed to quantitatively assess the spatial and semantic alignment between predicted saliency maps and model attention distributions. The proposed method demonstrates promising performance across various saliency prediction and cognitive alignment tasks, with results comparable to or surpassing recent state-of-the-art methods in several benchmarks. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance to facilitate future research on cognitively aligned AIGC evaluation.
BraSTORM: A Dual-Branch Self-Supervised Framework for EEG Representation Learning via Input-Level Spatio-Temporal Decomposition
Authors: Yifan Wang; Der-Horng Lee; Bruce X.B. Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Prevalent pre-training strategies for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are often constrained by spatio-temporal entanglement. This critical issue arises from processing multi-channel Electroencephalography (EEG) signals as monolithic sequences, which intertwines the signal's temporal dynamics with its spatial topography and hinders the learning of robust and generalizable representations. To address this, we introduce BraSTORM, a framework that explicitly disentangles EEG data into separate temporal and spatial streams at the input level. Two streams are processed by parallel encoders trained with a composite dual-objective: a masked signal reconstruction loss captures fine-grained, intra-modal details, while a cross-modal contrastive loss enforces high-level semantic alignment. Extensive fine-tuning experiments on six benchmarks covering three major BCI downstream tasks—Emotion Recognition, Sleep Staging, and Motor Imagery—demonstrate that BraSTORM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our findings validate that resolving spatio-temporal entanglement at the input level can be a competitive pre-training framework for the BCI field.
Reasoning Shapes Alignment: Investigating Cultural Alignment in Large Reasoning Models with Cultural Norms
Authors: Yuhang Wang; Yanxu Zhu; Jitao Sang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models enable them to thoroughly understand and apply safety policies through deliberate thought processes, thereby improving the models' safety.  Beyond safety, these models must also be able to reflect the diverse range of human values across various cultures. This paper presents the Cultural Norm-based Cultural Alignment (CNCA) framework, which enables models to leverage their powerful reasoning ability to align with cultural norms. Specifically, we propose three methods to automatically mine cultural norms from limited survey data and explore ways to effectively utilize these norms for improving cultural alignment. Two alignment paradigms are examined: an in-context alignment method, where cultural norms are explicitly integrated into the user context, and a fine-tuning-based method, which internalizes norms through enhanced Chain-of-Thought training data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, highlighting that models with stronger reasoning capabilities benefit more from cultural norm mining and utilization. Our findings emphasize the potential for reasoning models to better reflect diverse human values through culturally informed alignment strategies.
QueryCraft: Transformer-Guided Query Initialization for Enhanced Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Yuxiao Wang; Wolin Liang; Yu Lei; Weiying Xue; Nan Zhuang; Qi Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and recognize their interactions in images. Although DETR-based methods have recently emerged as the mainstream framework for HOI detection, they still suffer from a key limitation: Randomly initialized queries lack explicit semantics, leading to suboptimal detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose QueryCraft, a novel plug-and-play HOI detection framework that incorporates semantic priors and guided feature learning through transformer-based query initialization. Central to our approach is ACTOR (Action-aware Cross-modal TransfORmer), a cross-modal Transformer encoder that jointly attends to visual regions and textual prompts to extract action-relevant features. Rather than merely aligning modalities, ACTOR leverages language-guided attention to infer interaction semantics and produce semantically meaningful query representations. To further enhance object-level query quality, we introduce a Perceptual Distilled Query Decoder (PDQD), which distills object category awareness from a pre-trained detector to serve as object query initiation. This dual-branch query initialization enables the model to generate more interpretable and effective queries for HOI detection. Extensive experiments on HICO-Det and V-COCO benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization.
What-Meets-Where: Unified Learning of Action and Contact Localization in Images
Authors: Yuxiao Wang; Yu Lei; Wolin Liang; Weiying Xue; Zhenao Wei; Nan Zhuang; Qi Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: People control their bodies to establish contact with the environment. To comprehensively understand actions across diverse visual contexts, it is essential to simultaneously consider what action is occurring and where it is happening. Current methodologies, however, often inadequately capture this duality, typically failing to jointly model both action semantics and their spatial contextualization within scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel vision task that simultaneously predicts high-level action semantics and fine-grained body-part contact regions. Our proposed framework, PaIR-Net, comprises three key components: the Contact Prior Aware Module (CPAM) for identifying contact-relevant body parts, the Prior-Guided Concat Segmenter (PGCS) for pixel-wise contact segmentation, and the Interaction Inference Module (IIM) responsible for integrating global interaction relationships. To facilitate this task, we present PaIR (Part-aware Interaction Representation), a comprehensive dataset containing 13,979 images that encompass 654 actions, 80 object categories, and 17 body parts. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that PaIR-Net significantly outperforms baseline approaches, while ablation studies confirm the efficacy of each architectural component.
F.A.C.U.L.: Language-Based Interaction with AI Companions in Gaming
Authors: Wenya Wei; Sipeng Yang; Qixian Zhou; Ruochen Liu; Xuelei Zhang; Yifu Yuan; Yan Jiang; Yongle Luo; Hailong Wang; Tianzhou Wang; Peipei Jin; Wangtong Liu; Zhou Zhao; Xiaogang Jin; Elvis S. Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In cooperative video games, traditional AI companions are deployed to assist players, who control them using hotkeys or command wheels to issue predefined commands such as ''attack'', ''defend'', or ''retreat''. Despite their simplicity, these methods, which lack target specificity, limit players' ability to give complex tactical instructions and hinder immersive gameplay experiences. To address this, we propose the FPS AI Companion who Understands Language (F.A.C.U.L.), the first real-time AI system that enables players to communicate and collaborate with AI companions using natural language. By integrating natural language processing with a confidence-based framework, F.A.C.U.L. efficiently decomposes complex commands and interprets player intent. It also employs a dynamic entity retrieval method for environmental awareness, aligning human intentions with decision-making. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, our method supports real-time language interactions, enabling players to issue complex commands such as ''clear the second floor,'' ''take cover behind that tree,'' or ''retreat to the river''. The system provides real-time behavioral responses and vocal feedback, ensuring seamless tactical collaboration. Using the popular FPS game Arena Breakout: Infinite as a case study, we present comparisons demonstrating the efficacy of our approach and discuss the advantages and limitations of AI companions based on real-world user feedback.
State Mamba: Spatiotemporal EEG State-Space Model with Dynamic Brain Alignment for Cross-Subject Representation
Authors: Weining Weng; Yang Gu; Yuan Ma; Yuchen Liu; Yingwei Zhang; Yiqiang Chen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding remains a fundamental challenge due to substantial inter-subject variability in brain activity, which hinders the development of subject-independent EEG models. Despite progress in extracting cross-subject invariant features, existing studies neglect the shared neural responses that arise under similar cognitive or emotional states across individuals, limiting their ability to learn generalized and consistent EEG representations. To address the challenges, we propose State Mamba, a novel spatiotemporal EEG state-space model that explicitly models and aligns neural responses and their spatiotemporal state transitions to learn consistent and generalizable representations across subjects. Innovatively, State Mamba theoretically formulates a multi-channel Mamba architecture that jointly models spatial and temporal brain state transitions, supporting principled analysis of neural responses. To enhance spatiotemporal feature coupling, we introduce the LGANN module, which adopts global-local attention to integrate long- and short-term brain activity into a compact EEG representation. Furthermore, we design two self-supervised pretext tasks to extract consistent neural patterns across subjects: (1) representation alignment to align EEG representation, and (2) pattern alignment to align their transition rules under identical conditions, jointly promoting subject-invariant EEG representations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, FACED, DEAP, and ISRUC, demonstrate the superior performance of State Mamba in cross-subject emotion and sleep recognition tasks, validating its robust generalization capability.