GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Modelling the Effects of Hearing Loss on Neural Coding in the Auditory Midbrain with Variational Conditioning
Authors: Lloyd Pellatt; Fotios Drakopoulos; Shievanie Sabesan; Nicholas A. Lesica
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The mapping from sound to neural activity that underlies hearing is highly non-linear. The first few stages of this mapping in the cochlea have been modelled successfully, initially with biophysical models built by hand and, more recently, with DNN models trained on datasets simulated by the biophysical models. Modelling the auditory brain has been a challenge because central auditory processing is too complex for models to be built by hand, and datasets for training DNN models directly have not been available. Recent work has taken advantage of large-scale high resolution neural recordings from the auditory midbrain to build a DNN model of normal hearing with great success. But this model assumes that auditory processing is the same in all brains, and therefore it cannot capture the widely varying effects of hearing loss.  
     
We propose a novel variational-conditional model to learn to encode the space of hearing loss directly from recordings of neural activity in the auditory midbrain of normal and noise exposed animals. With hearing loss parametrised by only 6 free parameters per animal, our model accurately predicts 62% of the explainable variance in neural responses from normal hearing animals and 68% for hearing impaired animals, comparable to state of the art animal specific models. We demonstrate that the model can be used to simulate realistic activity from out of sample animals by fitting only the learned conditioning parameters with Bayesian optimisation, achieving crossentropy loss within 2% of the optimum in 15-30 iterations. Including more animals in the training data slightly improved the performance on unseen animals. This model will enable future development of parametrised hearing loss compensation models trained to directly restore normal neural coding in hearing impaired brains, which can be quickly fitted for a new user by human in the loop optimisation.
A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation
Authors: Shanshan Qin; Joshua L. Pughe-Sanford; Alexander Genkin; Pembe Gizem Ozdil; Philip Greengard; Anirvan M. Sengupta; Dmitri Chklovskii
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: We introduce a biologically inspired, multilayer neural architecture composed of Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs). Each ReSU projects a recent window of its input history onto a canonical direction obtained via canonical correlation analysis (CCA) of previously observed past–future input pairs, and then rectifies either its positive or negative component. By encoding canonical directions in synaptic weights and temporal filters, ReSUs implement a local, self-supervised algorithm for progressively constructing increasingly complex features.

To evaluate both computational power and biological fidelity, we trained a two-layer ReSU network in a self-supervised regime on translating natural scenes. First-layer units, each driven by a single pixel, developed temporal filters resembling those of Drosophila post-photoreceptor neurons (L1/L2 and L3), including their empirically observed adaptation to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Second-layer units, which pooled spatially over the first layer, became direction-selective—analogous to T4 motion-detecting cells—with learned synaptic weight patterns approximating those derived from connectomic reconstructions. 

Together, these results suggest that ReSUs offer (i) a principled framework for modeling sensory circuits and (ii) a biologically grounded, backpropagation-free paradigm for constructing deep self-supervised neural networks.
Emotion-Coherent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs via Emotional Rationale Verifier
Authors: Hyeongseop Rha; Jeong Hun Yeo; Yeonju Kim; Yong Man Ro
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is transforming human-computer interaction (HCI) from surface-level exchanges into more nuanced and emotionally intelligent communication. To realize this shift, emotion understanding becomes essential allowing systems to capture subtle cues underlying user intent. Furthermore, providing faithful explanations for predicted emotions is crucial to ensure interpretability and build user trust. However, current MLLM-based methods often generate emotion explanations that diverge from the ground-truth (GT) labels and sometimes even contradict their own predicted emotions. This inconsistency poses a critical risk for misunderstanding and erodes reliability in interactive settings. To address this, we propose a novel approach: the Emotional Rationale Verifier (ERV) and an Explanation Reward. Our method guides the model to produce reasoning that is explicitly consistent with the GT emotion during multimodal emotion recognition without modifying the model architecture or requiring paired video–description annotations. Our method significantly improves faithful explanation–prediction consistency and explanation emotion accuracy on the MAFW and DFEW datasets. 
Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we show that our approach not only enhances alignment between explanation and prediction but also empowers MLLMs to deliver emotionally coherent, trustworthy interactions, marking a key step toward truly human-like HCI systems.
SCORE: Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements
Authors: Zefan Shao; Jin Zhou; Hongliang Yang; Pengfei Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Collage is a powerful medium for visual expression, traditionally demanding significant artistic expertise and manual effort. Existing methods often struggle with a trade-off between semantic expression and the visual fidelity of the constituent images. To address this, we introduce SCORE (Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements), a novel text-driven framework that automates the creation of semantically rich and structurally sound collages. Our key innovation is to shift the optimization process entirely into the image space. By employing a differentiable renderer, we can backpropagate gradients from a powerful, pre-trained text-to-image model directly to the spatial parameters, including position, rotation, and scale, of each image element. We leverage Variational Score Distillation (VSD) to provide robust semantic guidance from a text prompt, ensuring the final layout aligns with the desired concept. Crucially, our ''minimal editing'' principle preserves the integrity of the original elements by forgoing any content-level modifications. The layout is refined by a joint loss function that combines the VSD-based semantic loss with structural regularizers that penalize overlap and enforce boundary constraints. The output of SCORE is a parametric, structured representation that allows further editing and downstream use. Our work reduces the barrier to creative expression and provides a new, powerful paradigm for organizing visual contents.
Invariant Representation Learning for Memory Behavior Modeling via Adaptive Environment Separation
Authors: Xiaoxuan Shen; Zhihai Hu; Fuqing Li; Shengyingjie Liu; Jianwen Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Memory behavior modeling seeks to predict individual recall performance and understand its underlying cognitive mechanisms. However, the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of memory data poses significant challenges to the generalization ability of models under unseen conditions. To address this challenge, we propose an invariant representation learning framework I-Mem that integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with decorrelation constraints, enabling the adaptive identification and suppression of environment-related factors in sequential behavioral data, thereby mitigating the influence of spurious features and enhancing the modeling of stable cognitive structures. Importantly, the method does not rely on explicit environment partitioning or predefined environment labels, while our theoretical analysis demonstrates that it can effectively resist environmental perturbations and facilitate the extraction of invariant structural representations, thereby ensuring adaptability and generalization. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets further confirm its superiority over mainstream methods in terms of generalization performance and stable feature identification. Feature attribution analysis reveals that I-Mem extracts invariant features aligned with classical cognitive effects, and reflects short-term behavioral patterns that may indicate latent cognitive mechanisms beyond existing theories, highlighting both interpretability and discovery potential.
Activation-wise Propagation: A One-Timestep Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Jian Song; Xiangfei Yang; Shangke Lyu; Donglin Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have demonstrated significant potential in real-time multi-sensor perception tasks due to their event-driven and parameter-efficient characteristics. A key challenge is the timestep-wise iterative update of neuronal hidden states (membrane potentials), which complicates the trade-off between accuracy and latency. SNNs tend to achieve better performance with longer timesteps, inevitably resulting in higher computational overhead and latency compared to artificial neural networks (ANNs). Moreover, many recent advances in SNNs rely on architecture-specific optimizations, which, while effective with fewer timesteps, often limit generalizability and scalability across modalities and models. To address these limitations, we propose Activation-wise Membrane Potential Propagation (AMP2), a unified hidden state update mechanism for SNNs. Inspired by the spatial propagation of membrane potentials in biological neurons, AMP2 enables dynamic transmission of membrane potentials among spatially adjacent neurons, facilitating spatiotemporal integration and cooperative dynamics of hidden states, thereby improving efficiency and accuracy while reducing reliance on extended temporal updates. This simple yet effective strategy significantly enhances SNN performance across various architectures, including MLPs and CNNs for point cloud and event-based data. Furthermore, ablation studies integrating AMP2 into Transformer-based SNNs for classification tasks demonstrate its potential as a general-purpose and efficient solution for spiking neural networks.
IntentMotion: Learning Intent-Aware Human Motion from Language in 3D Scenes
Authors: Wenfeng Song; Shi Zheng; Xinyu Zhang; Xingliang Jin; Aimin Hao; Fei Hou; Xia Hou; Shuai Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generating human motion in complex 3D scenes from text is a challenging task with broad applications. However, existing methods often overlook realistic physical contact, resulting in visually plausible but physically unrealistic motion, e.g., penetration. To alleviate this, we propose IntentMotion, a novel framework that generates human motion in 3D scenes from natural language instructions by explicitly modeling intent. We first introduce the Intention-Guided Contact Field (IGCF). This differentiable voxel-based contact region representation explicitly aligns parsed language roles with spatial contact regions through a hierarchical attention mechanism. IGCF is jointly trained with a diffusion-based motion generator, allowing contact predictions to adapt dynamically through gradient feedback. To improve the controllability and physics-aware motion, we further propose an Intention-Aware Diffusion Model (IADM), which decouples the high-level semantic planning from the low-level contact refinement in a coarse-to-fine process. The optimized contact cues are utilized to guide the synthesis of a coarse trajectory, followed by refining detailed pose sequences under IGCF supervision. Experiments on the HUMANISE and LINGO datasets demonstrate that our IntentMotion outperforms recent baselines in contact accuracy, semantic alignment, and generalization to unseen scenes.
Detecting Emotional Dynamic Trajectories: An Evaluation Framework for Emotional Support in Language Models
Authors: Zhouxing Tan; Ruochong Xiong; Yulong Wan; Jinlong Ma; Hanlin Xue; Qichun Deng; Haifeng Jing; Zhengtong Zhang; Depei Liu; Shiyuan Luo; Junfei Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Emotional support is a core capability in human-AI interaction, with applications including psychological counseling, role play, and companionship. However, existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) often rely on short, static dialogues and fail to capture the dynamic and long-term nature of emotional support. To overcome this limitation, we shift from snapshot-based evaluation to trajectory-based assessment, adopting a user-centered perspective that evaluates models based on their ability to improve and stabilize user emotional states over time. Our framework constructs a large-scale benchmark consisting of 328 emotional contexts and 1,152 disturbance events, simulating realistic emotional shifts under evolving dialogue scenarios. To encourage psychologically grounded responses, we constrain model outputs using validated emotion regulation strategies such as situation selection and cognitive reappraisal. User emotional trajectories are modeled as a first-order Markov process, and we apply causally-adjusted emotion estimation to obtain unbiased emotional state tracking. Based on this framework, we introduce three trajectory-level metrics: Baseline Emotional Level (BEL), Emotional Trajectory Volatility (ETV), and Emotional Centroid Position (ECP). These metrics collectively capture user emotional dynamics over time and support comprehensive evaluation of long-term emotional support performance of LLMs. Extensive evaluations across a diverse set of LLMs reveal significant disparities in emotional support capabilities and provide actionable insights for model development.
HiVA: Self-organized Hierarchical Variable Agent via Goal-driven Semantic-Topological Evolution
Authors: Jinzhou Tang; Jusheng Zhang; Qinhan Lv; Sidi Liu; Jing Yang; Chengpei Tang; Keze Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Autonomous agents play a crucial role in advancing Artificial General Intelligence, enabling problem decomposition and tool orchestration through Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off. On one hand, reusable fixed workflows require manual reconfiguration upon environmental changes; on the other hand, flexible reactive loops fail to distill reasoning progress into transferable structures. We introduce Hierarchical Variable Agent (HiVA), a novel framework modeling agentic workflows as self-organized graphs with the Semantic-Topological Evolution (STEV) algorithm, which optimizes hybrid semantic-topological spaces using textual gradients as discrete-domain surrogates for backpropagation. The iterative process comprises Multi-Armed Bandit-infused forward routing, diagnostic gradient generation from environmental feedback, and coordinated updates that co-evolve individual semantics and topology for collective optimization in unknown environments. Experiments on dialogue, coding, Long-context Q&A, mathematical, and agentic benchmarks demonstrate improvements of 5-10% in task accuracy and enhanced resource efficiency over existing baselines, establishing HiVA's effectiveness in autonomous task execution.
Multi-dimensional Neural Decoding with Orthogonal Representations for Brain-Computer Interfaces
Authors: Kaixi Tian; Shengjia Zhao; Yuhan Zhang; Shan Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Current brain-computer interfaces primarily decode single motor variables, limiting natural control requiring simultaneous multi-dimensional extraction. We introduce Multi-dimensional Neural Decoding (MND), a task that simultaneously extracts multiple motor variables (direction, position, velocity, acceleration) from single neural population recordings. MND faces two key challenges: cross-task interference when decoding correlated motor dimensions from shared cortical representations, and generalization issues across sessions, subjects, and paradigms. To address these challenges, we propose OrthoSchema, a multi-task framework inspired by cortical orthogonal subspace organization and cognitive schema reuse. OrthoSchema enforces representation orthogonality to eliminate cross-task interference and employs selective feature reuse transfer for few-shot cross-session, subject and paradigm adaptation. Experiments on macaque motor cortex datasets demonstrate that OrthoSchema significantly improves decoding accuracy in cross-session, subject and paradigm  generalization tasks, with larger performance improvements when fine-tuning samples are limited. Ablation studies confirm the synergistic effects of all components are crucial, with OrthoSchema effectively modeling cross-task features and capturing session relationships for robust transfer. Our results provide new insights into scalable and robust neural decoding for real-world BCI applications.
Dep-MAP: A Multi-level Alignment Framework with Semantic Prototypes for Video-based Automatic Depression Assessment
Authors: Hao Wang; Jiayu Ye; Qingxiang Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spatiotemporal analysis of facial behavior is a crucial method for evaluating the mental state of depression patients. However, in practice, depressed patients often display facial behaviors similar to healthy individuals due to masking tendencies. Additionally, facial expressions among depressed patients are also different, increasing the difficulty of assessment. To address this, we propose a video-based automatic depression assessment model Dep-MAP for complex facial behaviors of depression patients. Dep-MAP adopts a dual-branch architecture to extract visual features of facial behavior and capture corresponding emotional semantic features. Specifically, the extracted deep semantic features are clustered, resulting in semantically distinct prototype sets, where each severity group learns a set of discriminative facial behavior prototype representations, to suppress inter-class semantic confusion. Subsequently, we propose a semantic prototype-supervised contrastive learning method, which aligns latent semantics between shallow and deep features, realizing emotional semantic guidance and self-knowledge distillation for the visual feature branch, effectively suppressing intra-class difference. Then, we integrate key depression cues across multiple spatiotemporal scales via a multi-scale weighted fusion strategy, achieving automatic depression assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that Dep-MAP effectively identifies potential key frames in temporal sequences, and aggregates key frame representations with semantic consistency, achieving significantly superior state-of-the-art results on the AVEC2013 and AVEC2014 public datasets.
Hi-EF: Benchmarking Emotion Forecasting in Human-interaction
Authors: Haoran Wang; Xinji Mai; Zeng Tao; Junxiong Lin; Xuan Tong; Ivy Pan; Shaoqi Yan; Yan Wang; Shuyong Gao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Affective Forecasting is an psychology task that involves predicting an individual's future emotional responses, often hampered by reliance on external factors leading to inaccuracies, and typically remains at a qualitative analysis stage. To address these challenges, we narrows the scope of Affective Forecasting by introducing the concept of Human-interaction-based Emotion Forecasting (EF). This task is set within the context of a two-party interaction, positing that an individual's emotions are significantly influenced by their interaction partner's emotional expressions and informational cues. This dynamic provides a structured perspective for exploring the patterns of emotional change, thereby enhancing the feasibility of emotion forecasting.
SpikCommander: A High-performance Spiking Transformer with Multi-view Learning for Efficient Speech Command Recognition
Authors: Jiaqi Wang; Liutao Yu; Xiongri Shen; Sihang Guo; Chenlin Zhou; Leilei Zhao; Yi Zhong; Zhiguo Zhang; Zhengyu Ma
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising path toward energy-efficient speech command recognition (SCR) by leveraging their event-driven processing paradigm. However, existing SNN-based SCR methods often struggle to capture rich temporal dependencies and contextual information from speech due to limited temporal modeling and binary spike-based representations. To address these challenges, we first introduce the multi-view spiking temporal-aware self-attention (MSTASA) module, which combines effective spiking temporal-aware attention with a multi-view learning framework to model complementary temporal dependencies in speech commands. Building on MSTASA, we further propose SpikCommander, a fully spike-driven transformer architecture that integrates MSTASA with a spiking contextual refinement channel MLP (SCR-MLP) to jointly enhance temporal context modeling and channel-wise feature integration. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC), and the Google Speech Commands V2 (GSC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpikCommander consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN approaches with fewer parameters under comparable time steps, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency for robust speech command recognition.
Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Transformers
Authors: Jingya Wang; Xin Deng; Wenjie Wei; Dehao Zhang; Shuai Wang; Qian Sun; Jieyuan Zhang; Hanwen Liu; Ning Xie; Malu Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Leveraging the event-driven paradigm, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising approach for constructing energy-efficient Transformer architectures. Compared to directly trained Spiking Transformers, ANN-to-SNN conversion methods bypass the high training costs. However, existing methods still suffer from notable limitations, failing to effectively handle nonlinear operations in Transformer architectures and requiring additional fine-tuning processes for pre-trained ANNs. To address these issues, we propose a high-performance and training-free ANN-to-SNN conversion framework tailored for Transformer architectures. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-basis Exponential Decay (MBE) neuron, which employs an exponential decay strategy and multi-basis encoding method to efficiently approximate various nonlinear operations. It removes the requirement for weight modifications in pre-trained ANNs. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (CV, NLU, NLG) and mainstream Transformer architectures (ViT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrate that our method achieves near-lossless conversion accuracy with significantly lower latency. This provides a promising pathway for the efficient and scalable deployment of Spiking Transformers in real-world applications.
InterMoE: Individual-Specific 3D Human Interaction Generation via Dynamic Temporal-Selective MoE
Authors: Lipeng Wang; Hongxing Fan; Haohua Chen; Zehuan Huang; Lu Sheng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Generating high-quality human interactions holds significant value for applications like virtual reality and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to preserve unique individual characteristics or fully adhere to textual descriptions. To address these challenges, we introduce InterMoE, a novel framework built on a Dynamic Temporal-Selective Mixture of Experts. The core of InterMoE is a routing mechanism that synergistically uses both high-level text semantics and low-level motion context to dispatch temporal motion features to specialized experts. This allows experts to dynamically determine the selection capacity and focus on critical temporal features, thereby preserving specific individual characteristic identities while ensuring high semantic fidelity. Extensive experiments show that InterMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance in individual-specific high-fidelity 3D human interaction generation, reducing FID scores by 9% on the InterHuman dataset and 22% on InterX.