GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CCAHCL: Multi-Level Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for Connected Component Awareness
Authors: Zhuo Li; Gengyu Lyu; Yuena Lin; Ziang Chen; Zhiyuan Ma; Zhen Yang; Zun Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Hypergraph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful unsupervised paradigm for hypergraph representation learning. Traditional hypergraph contrastive learning methods typically leverage neighbor aggregation strategy to obtain entity (node and hyperedge) representations within each connected component, and then utilize contrastive losses (e.g., node- or hyperedge-level) to update the encoders. However, since entities are usually focused equally on their respective losses, large connected components with numerous entities tend to provide a dominant contribution to the whole learning process, which inevitably hinders the effective learning of entity representations within small connected components. To address this issue, we propose a novel Connected-Component-Aware Hypergraph Contrastive Learning method (CCAHCL). Different from previous methods that only construct node or hyperedge representations, our method additionally constructs the connected component representations, and accordingly designs a hierarchical contrastive loss to balance the model's focus on different scales of connected components. Specifically, we first use the traditional neighbor aggregation strategy to aggregate and update entity (node and hyperedge) representations. Then, these entity representations are further aggregated to generate the connected component representations, where entity features are incorporated into connected components and their structural information is propagated back to enrich their corresponding entities. Afterwards, we employ node-level and hyperedge-level losses to learn the enriched entity representations, and further propose a novel connected-component-level contrastive loss to balance the model's focus on all different connected components, naturally avoiding the learning bias on large connected components. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves superior performance against other state-of-the-art methods.
Self-Enhanced Image Clustering with Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency
Authors: Zihan Li; Wei Sun; Jing Hu; Jianhua Yin; Xing Wang; Erwei Yin; Jianlong Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: While large language-image pre-trained models like CLIP offer powerful generic features for image clustering, existing methods typically freeze the encoder. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the model's task-agnostic representations and the demands of a specific clustering task, imposing a ceiling on performance. To break this ceiling, we propose a self-enhanced framework based on cross-modal semantic consistency for efficient image clustering. Our framework first builds a strong foundation via Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency and then specializes the encoder through Self-Enhancement.
In the first stage, we focus on Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency. By mining consistency between generated image-text pairs at the instance, cluster assignment, and cluster center levels, we train lightweight clustering heads to align with the rich semantics of the pre-trained model. This alignment process is bolstered by a novel method for generating higher-quality cluster centers and a dynamic balancing regularizer to ensure well-distributed assignments. 
In the second stage, we introduce a Self-Enhanced fine-tuning strategy. The well-aligned model from the first stage acts as a reliable pseudo-label generator. These self-generated supervisory signals are then used to feed back the efficient, joint optimization of the vision encoder and clustering heads, unlocking their full potential.
Extensive experiments on six mainstream datasets show that our method outperforms existing deep clustering methods by significant margins. Notably, our ViT-B/32 model already matches or even surpasses the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods built upon the far larger ViT-L/14.
ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval
Authors: Zixu Li; Yupeng Hu; Zhiwei Chen; Qinlei Huang; Guozhi Qiu; Zhiheng Fu; Meng Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the rapid growth of video data, Composed Video Retrieval (CVR) has emerged as a novel paradigm in video retrieval and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. Unlike unimodal video retrieval methods, the CVR task takes a multi-modal query consisting of a reference video and a piece of modification text as input. The modification text conveys the user's intended alterations to the reference video. Based on this input, the model aims to retrieve the most relevant target video. In the CVR task, there exists a substantial discrepancy in information density between video and text modalities. Traditional composition methods tend to bias the composed feature toward the reference video, which leads to suboptimal retrieval performance. This limitation is significant due to the presence of three core challenges: (1) modal contribution entanglement, (2) explicit optimization of composed features, and (3) retrieval uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose the evidence-dRivEn dual-sTream diRectionAl anChor calibration networK (ReTrack). ReTrack is the first CVR framework that improves multi-modal query understanding by calibrating directional bias in composed features. It consists of three key modules: Semantic Contribution Disentanglement, Composition Geometry Calibration, and Reliable Evidence-driven Alignment. Specifically, ReTrack estimates the semantic contribution of each modality to calibrate the directional bias of the composed feature. It then uses the calibrated directional anchors to compute bidirectional evidence that drives reliable composed-to-target similarity estimation. Moreover, ReTrack exhibits strong generalization to the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task, achieving SOTA performance across three benchmark datasets in both CVR and CIR scenarios.
Fair Domain Generalization: An Information-Theoretic View
Authors: Tangzheng Lian; Guanyu Hu; Dimitrios Kollias; Xinyu Yang; Oya Celiktutan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Domain generalization (DG) and algorithmic fairness are two key challenges in machine learning. However, most DG methods focus solely on minimizing expected risk in the unseen target domain, without considering algorithmic fairness. Conversely, fairness methods typically do not account for domain shifts, so the fairness achieved during training may not generalize to unseen test domains. In this work, we bridge these gaps by studying the problem of Fair Domain Generalization (FairDG), which aims to minimize both expected risk and fairness violations in unseen target domains. We derive novel mutual information-based upper bounds for expected risk and fairness violations in multi-class classification tasks with multi-group sensitive attributes. These bounds provide key insights for algorithm design from an information-theoretic perspective. Guided by these insights, we propose a practical method that solves the FairDG problem through Pareto optimization. Experiments on real-world vision and language datasets show that our method achieves superior utility–fairness trade-offs compared to existing approaches.
DeepBooTS: Dual-Stream Residual Boosting for Drift-Resilient Time-Series Forecasting
Authors: Daojun Liang; Jing Chen; Xiao Wang; Yinglong Wang; Shuo Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Time-Series (TS) exhibits pronounced non-stationarity. Consequently, most forecasting methods display compromised robustness to concept drift, despite the prevalent application of instance normalization. We tackle this challenge by first analysing concept drift through a bias-variance lens and proving that weighted ensemble reduces variance without increasing bias. These insights motivate DeepBooTS, a novel end-to-end dual-stream residual-decreasing boosting method that progressively reconstructs the intrinsic signal. In our design, each block of a deep model becomes an ensemble of learners with an auxiliary output branch forming a highway to the final prediction. The block‑wise outputs correct the residuals of previous blocks, leading to a learning‑driven decomposition of both inputs and targets. This method enhances versatility and interpretability while substantially improving robustness to concept drift. Extensive experiments, including those on large-scale datasets, show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods by a large margin, yielding an average performance improvement of 15.8% across various datasets, establishing a new benchmark for TS forecasting.
An Improved Privacy and Utility Analysis of Differentially Private SGD with Bounded Domain and Smooth Losses
Authors: Hao Liang; Wanrong Zhang; Xinlei He; Kaishun Wu; Hong Xing
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely used to protect sensitive data during the training of machine learning models, but its privacy guarantee often comes at a large cost of model performance due to the lack of tight theoretical bounds quantifying privacy loss. While recent efforts have achieved more accurate privacy guarantees, they still impose some assumptions prohibited from practical applications, such as convexity and complex parameter requirements, and rarely investigate in-depth the impact of privacy mechanisms on the model's utility. In this paper, we provide a rigorous privacy characterization for DPSGD with general L-smooth and non-convex loss functions, revealing converged privacy loss with iteration in bounded-domain cases. Specifically, we track the privacy loss over multiple iterations, leveraging the noisy smooth-reduction property, and further establish comprehensive convergence analysis in different scenarios. In particular, we show that for DPSGD with a bounded domain, (i) the privacy loss can still converge without the convexity assumption, (ii) a smaller bounded diameter can improve both privacy and utility simultaneously under certain conditions, and (iii) the attainable big-O order of the privacy utility trade-off for DPSGD with gradient clipping (DPSGD-GC) and for DPSGD-GC with bounded domain (DPSGD-DC) and strongly convex population risk function, respectively. Experiments via membership inference attack (MIA) in a practical setting validate insights gained from the theoretical results.
Near-optimal Linear Predictive Clustering in Non-separable Spaces via MIP and QPBO Reductions
Authors: Jiazhou Liang; Hassan Khurram; Scott Sanner
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Linear Predictive Clustering (LPC) partitions samples based on shared linear relationships between feature and target variables, with numerous applications including marketing, medicine, and education. Greedy optimization methods, commonly used for LPC, alternate between clustering and linear regression but lack global optimality. While effective for separable clusters, they struggle in non-separable settings where clusters overlap in feature space. In an alternative constrained optimization paradigm, previous works formulated LPC as a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP), ensuring global optimality regardless of separability but at the cost of poor scalability. This work builds on the constrained optimization paradigm to introduce two novel approaches that improve the efficiency of global optimization for LPC. By leveraging key theoretical properties of separability, we derive near-optimal approximations with provable error bounds, significantly reducing the MIP formulation’s complexity and improving scalability. Additionally, we can further approximate LPC as a Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (QPBO) problem, achieving additional computational gains in the special case of two clusters. Comparative analyses on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods consistently achieve near-optimal solutions with substantially lower regression errors than greedy optimization while exhibiting superior scalability over existing MIP formulations.
Discrete-Guided Diffusion for Scalable and Safe Multi-Robot Motion Planning
Authors: Jinhao Liang; Sven Koenig; Ferdinando Fioretto
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-Robot Motion Planning (MRMP) involves generating collision-free trajectories for multiple robots operating in a shared continuous workspace. While discrete multi-agent path finding (MAPF) methods are broadly adopted due to their scalability, their coarse discretization severely limits trajectory quality. In contrast, continuous optimization-based planners offer higher-quality paths but suffer from the curse of dimensionality, resulting in poor scalability with respect to the number of robots. This paper tackles the limitations of these two approaches by introducing a novel framework that integrates discrete MAPF solvers with constrained generative diffusion models. The resulting framework, called Discrete-Guided Diffusion (DGD), has three key characteristics: (1) it decomposes the original nonconvex MRMP problem into tractable subproblems with convex configuration spaces, (2) it combines discrete MAPF solutions with constrained optimization techniques to guide diffusion models capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies among robots, and (3) it incorporates a lightweight constraint repair mechanism to ensure trajectory feasibility. The proposed method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in large-scale, complex environments, scaling to 100 robots while achieving planning efficiency and high success rates.
On the Impact of Weight Quantization on Deep Neural Network Uncertainty
Authors: Shuang Liang; Xun Lu; Zi-Ang Liu; Ming-Liang Wang; Yan Lyu; Shao-Qun Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Weight Quantization (WQ) is a key technique for lightweight Deep Neural Network (DNN) computations. While existing algorithms often pursue memory compression and inference acceleration with accuracy comparable to full-precision models, the effect of WQ on DNN uncertainty remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we quantify the impact of WQ on DNN uncertainty through the novel Exact Moment Propagation (EMP) uncertainty estimator. It is observed that WQ significantly increases DNN uncertainty. Based on the EMP estimator, we propose the MOMent Alignment (MOMA) to reduce WQ-induced uncertainty and preserve the accuracy of weight-quantized DNNs. Empirical results across various DNN architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness of both EMP and MOMA methods.
Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Through Visual and Textual Thinking
Authors: Xun Liang; Xin Guo; Zhongming Jin; Weihang Pan; Penghui Shang; Deng Cai; Binbin Lin; Jieping Ye
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The spatial reasoning task aims to reason about the spatial relationships in 2D and 3D space, which is a fundamental capability for Visual Question Answering (VQA) and robotics. Although vision language models (VLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, they are still struggling with the spatial reasoning task. In this paper, we introduce a method that can enhance Spatial reasoning through Visual and Textual thinking Simultaneously (SpatialVTS). In the spatial visual thinking phase, our model is trained to generate location-related specific tokens of important targets automatically. Not only are the objects mentioned in the problem addressed, but also the potential objects related to the reasoning are considered. During the spatial textual thinking phase, our model conducts long-term thinking based on visual cues and dialogues and gradually inferences the answers to spatial reasoning problems. To effectively support the model's training, we made manual corrections to the existing spatial reasoning dataset, eliminating numerous incorrect labels resulting from automatic annotation, restructuring the data input format to enhance generalization, and developing a reasoning framework for model thinking. Without introducing any additional information (such as masks or depth), our model's overall average level in several spatial understanding tasks has significantly improved compared with other models.
Attribute-guided Dynamic Prompt Learning for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zhuomin Liang; Liang Bai; Xian Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in analyzing graph-structured data, with their performance dependent on the graph structure. However, models trained on high-quality graph structures often suffer a significant performance drop when evaluated on perturbed graphs. Existing methods tackle this problem by improving the robustness of GNNs, but they often overlook representation deviation caused by structural changes. To address this limitation, we propose an attribute-guided dynamic prompt learning model that generates prompt vectors to approximate the intrinsic information of nodes. With these prompt vectors, the trained GNNs are expected to maintain their performance under perturbed graph structures. Unlike previous prompt-based methods that learn unified prompt vectors for all nodes, we obtain node-level prompts by encoding node attributes that provide unique information. Given the diversity of perturbed graph structures during inference, we introduce a structure-aware adaptation mechanism that adjusts the prompt vectors based on the input graph. Furthermore, we apply gradient-based attacks to generate perturbed graphs, encouraging the model to generalize to unseen structures. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model.
DarkFarseer: Robust Spatio-Temporal Kriging Under Graph Sparsity and Noise
Authors: Zhuoxuan Liang; Wei Li; Dalin Zhang; Ziyu Jia; Yidan Chen; Zhihong Wang; Xiangping Zheng; Moustafa Youssef
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created a growing demand for large-scale sensor deployment. However, the high cost of physical sensors limits the scalability and coverage of sensor networks, making fine-grained sensing difficult. Inductive Spatio-Temporal Kriging (ISK) addresses this challenge by introducing virtual sensors that infer measurements from physical sensors, typically using graph neural networks (GNNs) to model their relationships. Despite its promise, current ISK methods often rely on standard message-passing and generic architectures that fail to effectively capture spatio-temporal features or represent virtual nodes accurately. Additionally, existing graph construction techniques suffer from sparse and noisy connections, further hindering performance. To address these limitations, we propose DarkFarseer, a novel ISK framework with three key innovations. First, the Style-enhanced Temporal-Spatial architecture adopts a temporal-then-spatial processing scheme with a temporal style transfer mechanism to enhance virtual node representations. Second, Regional-semantic Contrastive Learning improves representation learning by aligning virtual nodes with regional component patterns. Third, the Similarity-Based Graph Denoising Strategy mitigates the influence of noisy edges by leveraging temporal similarity and regional structure. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DarkFarseer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art ISK methods.
Dynamic Semantic Tokenization for Time Series via Elastic Sampling on Physics-aware Perception
Authors: Huaizhang Liao; Zhixiong Yang; Jingyuan Xia; Yuheng Sun; Yue Zhang; Shengxi Li; Yongxiang Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of semantic token learning in NLP and vision domains, token-level representation mechanisms face fundamental challenges when extended to continuous time series analysis. We identify a core limitation lies in the intrinsic absence of semantically meaningful tokenization boundaries within time-series, which differs substantially from discrete text tokens and presents unique complexities compared to spatially coherent image patches. While existing works mechanically apply fixed-length partitioning, recent evidence from time series foundation models reveals performance ceilings in prediction tasks under such paradigms. This paper introduces a novel tokenization framework known as physics-aware tokenization (PATK), designed to implement adaptive time-frequency tokenization via distribution-sensitive sampling strategies. Key innovations include: 1) A Rate-of-Variation (RoV) distribution is meticulously structured to encompass multi-scale temporal dynamics in the time domain, alongside a Spectral Energy Intensity (SEI) distribution devised to reveal global seasonal patterns within the frequency domain; 2) A physics-aware hidden Markov modeling (PA-HMM) is then established to adaptively breaks down continuous time-series into distinct tokens with elastic lengths, responding to physics-aware probabilities sampled from RoV and SEI distributions. The proposed PATK allows steady integration with both conventional Transformers and advanced large-scale time series models (including LLM-transferred methods and pretrained time series foundation models). Simulations across various datasets demonstrate that PATK excels in classification and forecasting tasks, showing notable adaptability to model long-term dependencies, strengthening resilience against disturbances, and robustness to missing data events.
From Static to Active: Knowledge-Aware Node State Selection in Multi-view Graph Learning
Authors: Weiran Liao; Jielong Lu; Yuhong Chen; Shide Du; Hongrong Chen; Shiping Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimedia technologies leverage multi-source to alleviate real-world data incompleteness, providing a versatile platform for multi-view learning.
Among existing research, graph-based multi-view learning has achieved notable success.
However, prior studies always immerse in comprehensive collaboration across all views and nodes to pursue consistency and complementary, which ignore the negative contribution of nodes from low-quality views.
To overcome the above limitation, we explore node behavior selection in multi-view dynamic modeling and propose a knowledge-aware multi-view state space model.
Specifically, nodes autonomously select either activation sequences or static sequences according to their current knowledge.
In the former,  we design the mask-based attention mechanism to capture the dynamics of node behaviors. 
In the latter, we construct a history pool and simulate synaptic signals to regulate the behavioral distribution of nodes. 
Moreover, the proposed model provides a directional inter-view diffusion equation that selectively propagates information to alleviate interference from low-quality nodes across views.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baselines on multiple benchmarks and achieves significant performance improvement.