AAAI 2026 Papers

Synthesizing amyloid PET scans from the more widely available and accessible structural MRI modality offers a promising, cost-effective approach for large-scale Alzheimer's Disease (AD) screening. This is motivated by evidence that, while MRI does not directly detect amyloid pathology, it may nonetheless encode information correlated with amyloid deposition that can be uncovered through advanced modeling. However, the high dimensionality and structural complexity of 3D neuroimaging data pose significant challenges for existing MRI-to-PET translation methods. Modeling the cross-modality relationship in a lower-dimensional latent space can simplify the learning task and enable more effective translation. As such, we present CoCoLIT (ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation), a diffusion-based latent generative framework that incorporates three main innovations: (1) a novel Weighted Image Space Loss (WISL) that improves latent representation learning and synthesis quality; (2) a theoretical and empirical analysis of Latent Average Stabilization (LAS), an existing technique used in similar generative models to enhance inference consistency; and (3) the introduction of ControlNet-based conditioning for MRI-to-PET translation. We evaluate CoCoLIT's performance on publicly available datasets and find that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both image-based and amyloid-related metrics. Notably, in amyloid-positivity classification, CoCoLIT outperforms the second-best method with improvements of +10.5% on the internal dataset and +23.7% on the external dataset.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) has become vital in medical imaging, but automated systems often struggle to replicate the nuanced process of clinical interpretation. Expert diagnosis requires a comprehensive analysis of how abnormalities relate to each other across various views and time points, but current multi-view CADx methods frequently overlook these complex dependencies. Specifically, they fail to model the crucial relationships within a single view and the dynamic changes lesions exhibit across different views. This limitation, combined with the common challenge of incomplete data, greatly reduces their predictive reliability. To address these gaps, we reframe the diagnostic task as one of relationship modeling and propose GIIM, a novel graph-based approach. Our framework is uniquely designed to simultaneously capture both critical intra-view dependencies between abnormalities and inter-view dynamics. Furthermore, it ensures diagnostic robustness by incorporating specific techniques to effectively handle missing data, a common clinical issue. We demonstrate the generality of this approach through extensive evaluations on diverse imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and mammography. The results confirm that our GIIM model significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy and robustness over existing methods, establishing a more effective framework for future CADx systems.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements across various domains, and corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been continuously refined and improved. In this process, benchmarks in the scientific domain have played an important role in assessing the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks still face three key challenges: 1) Insufficient evaluation of models' reasoning abilities in multilingual scenarios; 2) Inadequate assessment of MLLMs' comprehensive modality coverage; 3) Lack of fine-grained annotation of scientific knowledge points. To address these gaps, we propose MME-SCI, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark. We carefully collected 1,019 high-quality question-answer pairs, which involve 3 distinct evaluation modes. These pairs cover four subjects, namely mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, and support five languages: Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We conducted extensive experiments on 16 open-source models and 4 closed-source models, and the results demonstrate that MME-SCI is widely challenging for existing MLLMs. For instance, under the Image-only evaluation mode, o4-mini achieved accuracy of only 52.11%, 24.73%, 36.57%, and 29.80% in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, respectively, indicating a significantly higher difficulty level compared to existing benchmarks. More importantly, using MME-SCI's multilingual and fine-grained knowledge attributes, we analyzed existing models' performance in depth and identified their weaknesses in specific domains. For example, in questions related to "Magnetic Field", o4-mini correctly answered only 5 out of 33 questions, thereby fine-grainedly exposing the model's vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the urgent need to enhance the scientific reasoning capabilities of MLLMs.

Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) aims to segment target objects in remote sensing (RS) images based on textual descriptions. Although Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has shown remarkable performance in various segmentation tasks, its application to RRSIS presents several challenges, including understanding the text-described RS scenes and generating effective prompts from text. To address these issues, we propose RS2-SAM2, a novel framework that adapts SAM2 to RRSIS by aligning the adapted RS features and textual features while providing pseudo-mask-based dense prompts. Specifically, we employ a union encoder to jointly encode the visual and textual inputs, generating aligned visual and text embeddings as well as multimodal class tokens. A bidirectional hierarchical fusion module is introduced to adapt SAM2 to RS scenes and align adapted visual features with the visually enhanced text embeddings, improving the model's interpretation of text-described RS scenes. To provide precise target cues for SAM2, we design a mask prompt generator, which takes the visual embeddings and class tokens as input and produces a pseudo-mask as the dense prompt of SAM2. Experimental results on several RRSIS benchmarks demonstrate that RS2-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance.

We propose a novel Auto-Regressive (AR) image generation approach that models images as hierarchical compositions of interpretable visual layers. While AR models have achieved transformative success in language modeling, replicating this success in vision remains challenging due to inherent spatial dependencies in images. Addressing the unique challenges of vision tasks, our method (CART) adds image details iteratively via semantically meaningful decompositions. We demonstrate the flexibility and generality of CART by applying it across three distinct decomposition strategies: (i) Base-Detail Decomposition (Mumford-Shah smoothness), (ii) Intrinsic Decomposition (albedo/shading), and (iii) Specularity Decomposition (diffuse/specular). This “next-detail" strategy outperforms traditional “next-token" and “next-scale" approaches, improving controllability, semantic interpretability, and resolution scalability. Experiments show CART generates visually compelling results while enabling structured image manipulation, opening new directions for controllable generative modeling via physically or perceptually motivated image factorization.

In the era of large-scale visual data, understanding collections of images is a challenging yet important task. To this end, we introduce ImageSet2Text, a novel method to automatically generate natural language descriptions of image sets. Based on large language models, visual-question answering chains, an external lexical graph, and CLIP-based verification, ImageSet2Text iteratively extracts key concepts from image subsets and organizes them into a structured concept graph. We conduct extensive experiments evaluating the quality of the generated descriptions in terms of accuracy, completeness, and user satisfaction. We also examine the method's behavior through ablation studies, scalability assessments, and failure analyses. Results demonstrate that ImageSet2Text combines data-driven AI and symbolic representations to reliably summarize large image collections for a wide range of applications.

Minimizing inconsistencies across successive versions of an AI system is as crucial as reducing the overall error. In image classification, such inconsistencies manifest as negative flips, where an updated model misclassifies test samples that were previously classified correctly. This issue becomes increasingly pronounced as the number of training classes grows over time, since adding new categories reduces the margin of each class and may introduce conflicting patterns that undermine their learning process, thereby degrading performance on the original subset. To mitigate negative flips, we propose a novel approach that preserves the margins of the original model while learning an improved one. Our method encourages a larger relative margin between the previously learned and newly introduced classes by introducing an explicit margin-calibration term on the logits. However, overly constraining the logit margin for the new classes can significantly degrade their accuracy compared to a new independently trained model. To address this, we integrate a double-source focal distillation loss with the previous model and a new independently trained model, learning an appropriate decision margin from both old and new data, even under a logit margin calibration. Extensive experiments on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces the negative flip rate with high overall accuracy.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently been widely applied to 3D point cloud understanding, with masked autoencoding as the predominant pre-training paradigm. However, the challenge of learning dense and informative semantic features from point clouds via standard ViTs remains underexplored. We propose MaskClu, a novel unsupervised pre-training method for ViTs on 3D point clouds that integrates masked point modeling with clustering-based learning. MaskClu is designed to reconstruct both cluster assignments and cluster centers from masked point clouds, thus encouraging the model to capture dense semantic information. Additionally, we introduce a global contrastive learning mechanism that enhances instance-level feature learning by contrasting different masked views of the same point cloud. By jointly optimizing these complementary objectives, i.e., dense semantic reconstruction, and instance-level contrastive learning. MaskClu enables ViTs to learn richer and more semantically meaningful representations from 3D point clouds. We validate the effectiveness of MaskClu via multiple 3D tasks, including part segmentation, semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification, setting new competitive results.

Microvascular invasion (MVI) is a critical prognostic factor that significantly impacts postoperative outcomes in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). As the current gold standard for the diagnosis of MVI is based on the postoperative histopathological examination of whole slide images, accurate preoperative prediction of MVI status using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) presents both a substantial clinical imperative and a significant challenge. In order to discover reliable MRI-based imaging biomarkers to support clinical decision making and enhance the interpretability of deep learning-based diagnostic models, we propose a novel interpretable MVI prediction framework in which the shared latent visual attributes are first learned and then used for potential imaging biomarker extraction and MVI diagnosis, respectively. To ensure that the visual attributes of these biomarkers are generalizable across diverse patients, the similarity constraints at the intra-patient level and the inter-patient level are enforced within the learned feature space, enabling intuitive biomarker discovery directly from the original image space. To guarantee semantic alignment between biomarkers and the characteristics of individual patients, we introduce a novel classification mechanism that directly links the alignment between each biomarker and patient-specific characteristics with the prediction, thereby ensuring a precise prediction of MVI. Furthermore, the interpretability of the model is enhanced by integrating a mask-based visual explanation method that highlights regions in patient images that correspond to the identified biomarkers. Extensive experiments on two MVI prediction datasets: HCC-WCH and HCC-ZSH unequivocally demonstrate our method's superior performance in both classification accuracy and interpretability.

The Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) has been gaining popularity as an alternative to the multilayer perceptron (MLP) due to its greater expressiveness and interpretability. Even so, KAN suffers from training instability and being orders of magnitude slower due to its increased computational cost, limiting its applicability to large-scale tasks. Recently, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (KAT) has been proposed, achieving FLOPs comparable to traditional Transformer models with MLPs by leveraging Group-Rational KAN (GR-KAN). Unfortunately, despite the comparable FLOPs, our testing shows that KAT remains 123x slower during training, indicating that there are other performance bottlenecks beyond FLOPs. In this paper, we conduct a series of experiments to understand the root cause of the slowdown in KAT. We uncover that the slowdown can be isolated to memory stalls, linked more specifically to inefficient gradient accumulations in the backward pass of GR-KAN. To address this memory bottleneck, we propose FlashKAT, which minimizes accesses to slow memory and the usage of atomic adds through a restructured kernel. Evaluations show that FlashKAT achieves up to an 86.5x training speedup over state-of-the-art KAT while reducing rounding errors in gradient computation.

In this paper, we address a challenging task, synchronous motion captioning, that aim to generate a language description synchronized with human motion sequences. This task pertains to numerous applications, such as aligned sign language transcription and unsupervised action segmentation and temporal grounding. Our method introduces mechanisms to control self- and cross-attention distributions of the Transformer, allowing interpretability and aligned text generation. We achieve this through masking strategies and structuring losses that push the model to maximize attention only on the most important frames contributing to the generation of a motion word. These constraints aim to prevent undesired mixing of information in attention maps and to provide a monotonic attention distribution across tokens. Thus, the cross attentions of tokens are used for progressive text generation in synchronization with human motion sequences. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach through evaluation on the two available benchmark datasets, KIT-ML and HumanML3D. As visual evaluation is essential for this task, we provide a comprehensive set of animated visual illustrations of the output of synchronous text generation in the code repository.

Reconstructing 3D objects from a single image is a long-standing challenge, particularly under real-world occlusions. While recent diffusion-based view synthesis models can generate consistent novel views from a single RGB image, they generally assume fully visible inputs and struggle when parts of the object are occluded, leading to inconsistent views and degraded 3D reconstruction quality. To address this limitation, we propose DeOcc-1-to-3, an end-to-end framework for occlusion-aware multi-view generation. Our method directly synthesizes six structurally consistent novel views from a single partially occluded image, enabling downstream 3D reconstruction without requiring prior inpainting or manual annotations. We design a self-supervised training pipeline that leverages occluded–unoccluded image pairs and pseudo-ground-truth views to guide structure-aware completion and view consistency. Without modifying the original architecture, we fully fine-tune the diffusion model to jointly learn completion and multi-view generation. Additionally, we introduce the first benchmark for occlusion-aware reconstruction, covering diverse occlusion levels, object categories, and mask patterns, providing a standardized evaluation protocol.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have shown success in robust 3D object detection tasks. Existing methods often rely on the score matching from 3D boxes or pre-trained diffusion priors. However, they typically require multi-step iterations in inference, which limits efficiency. To address this, we propose a Robust single-stage fully Sparse 3D object Detection Network with a Detachable Latent Framework (DLF) of DDPMs, named RSDNet. Specifically, RSDNet learns the denoising process in latent feature spaces through lightweight denoising networks like multi-level denoising autoencoders (DAEs). This enables RSDNet to effectively understand scene distributions under multi-level perturbations, achieving robust and reliable detection. Meanwhile, we reformulate the noising and denoising mechanisms of DDPMs, enabling DLF to construct multi-type and multi-level noise samples and targets, enhancing RSDNet robustness to multiple perturbations. Furthermore, a semantic-geometric conditional guidance is introduced to perceive the object boundaries and shapes, alleviating the center feature missing problem in sparse representations, enabling RSDNet to perform in a fully sparse detection pipeline. Moreover, the detachable denoising network design of DLF enables RSDNet to perform single-step detection in inference, further enhancing detection efficiency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that RSDNet can outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art detection.

Due to the long-range modeling ability and linear complexity property, Mamba has attracted considerable attention in point cloud analysis. Despite some interesting progress, related work still suffers from imperfect point cloud serialization, insufficient high-level geometric perception, and overfitting of the selective state space model (S6) at the core of Mamba. To this end, we resort to an SSM-based point cloud network termed CloudMamba to address the above challenges. Specifically, we propose sequence expanding and sequence merging, where the former serializes points along each axis separately and the latter serves to fuse the corresponding higher-order features causally inferred from different sequences, enabling unordered point sets to adapt more stably to the causal nature of Mamba without parameters. Meanwhile, we design chainedMamba that chains the forward and backward processes in the parallel bidirectional Mamba, capturing high-level geometric information during scanning. In addition, we propose a grouped selective state space model (GS6) via parameter sharing on S6, alleviating the overfitting problem caused by the computational mode in S6. Experiments on various point cloud tasks validate CloudMamba's ability to achieve state-of-the-art results with significantly less complexity.

In this paper, we present SegDINO3D, a novel Transformer encoder-decoder framework for 3D instance segmentation. As 3D training data is generally not as sufficient as 2D training images, SegDINO3D is designed to fully leverage 2D representation from a pre-trained 2D detection model, including both image-level and object-level features, for improving 3D representation. SegDINO3D takes both a point cloud and its associated 2D images as input. In the encoder stage, it first enriches each 3D point by retrieving 2D image features from its corresponding image views and then leverages a 3D encoder for 3D context fusion. In the decoder stage, it formulates 3D object queries as 3D anchor boxes and performs cross-attention from 3D queries to 2D object queries obtained from 2D images using the 2D detection model. These 2D object queries serve as a compact object-level representation of 2D images, effectively avoiding the challenge of keeping thousands of image feature maps in the memory while faithfully preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained 2D model. The introducing of 3D box queries also enables the model to modulate cross-attention using the predicted boxes for more precise querying. SegDINO3D achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNetV2 and ScanNet200 3D instance segmentation benchmarks. Notably, on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset, SegDINO3D significantly outperforms prior methods by +8.7 and +6.8 mAP on the validation and hidden test sets, respectively, demonstrating its superiority.

Accurate whole-heart segmentation is a critical component in the precise diagnosis and interventional planning of cardiovascular diseases. Integrating complementary information from modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can significantly enhance segmentation accuracy and robustness. However, existing multi-modal segmentation methods face several limitations: severe spatial inconsistency between modalities hinders effective feature fusion; fusion strategies are often static and lack adaptability; and the processes of feature alignment and segmentation are decoupled and inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-branch U-Net architecture enhanced by reinforcement learning for feature alignment, termed RL-U2Net, designed for precise and efficient multi-modal 3D whole-heart segmentation. The model employs a dual-branch U-shaped network to process CT and MRI patches in parallel, and introduces a novel RL-XAlign module between the encoders. The module employs a cross‑modal attention mechanism to capture semantic correspondences between modalities and a reinforcement learning agent learns an optimal rotation strategy that consistently aligns anatomical pose and texture features. The aligned features are then reconstructed through their respective decoders. Finally, an ensemble‑learning–based decision module integrates the predictions from individual patches to produce the final segmentation result. Experimental results on the publicly available MM-WHS 2017 dataset demonstrate that the proposed RL-U2Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving Dice coefficients of 93.1% on CT and 87.0% on MRI, thereby validating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in image compressed sensing (CS) task, namely reconstructing a high-fidelity image from its compressed measurement. However, existing methods are deficient in incoherent compressed measurement at sensing phase and implicit measurement representations at reconstruction phase, limiting the overall performance. In this work, we answer two questions: (i) how to improve the measurement incoherence for decreasing the ill-posedness; (ii) how to learn informative representations from measurements. To this end, we propose a novel asymmetric Kronecker CS (AKCS) model and theoretically present its better incoherence than previous Kronecker CS with minimal increase of complexity. Moreover, apart from the explicit measurement representations in gradient descent projection in unfolding networks, we further propose a measurement-aware cross attention (MACA) mechanism to learn implicit measurement representations. We integrate AKCS and MACA into a widely-used unfolding architecture to get a measurement-enhanced unfolding network (MEUNet). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MEUNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in reconstruction accuracy with high efficiency.

The growing prevalence of tampered images poses serious security threats, highlighting the urgent need for reliable detection methods. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong potential in analyzing tampered images and generating interpretations. However, they still struggle with identifying micro-level artifacts, exhibit low accuracy in localizing tampered text regions, and heavily rely on expensive annotations for forgery interpretation. To this end, we introduce TextShield-R1, the first reinforcement learning based MLLM solution for tampered text detection and reasoning. Specifically, our approach introduces Forensic Continual pre-training, an easy-to-hard curriculum that well prepares the MLLM for tampered text detection by harnessing the large-scale cheap data from natural image forensic and OCR tasks. During fine-tuning, we perform Group Relative Policy Optimization with novel reward functions to reduce annotation dependency and improve reasoning capabilities. At inference time, we enhance localization accuracy via OCR Rectification, a method that leverages the MLLM’s strong text recognition abilities to refine its predictions. Furthermore, to support rigorous evaluation, we introduce Text Forensics Reasoning (TFR) benchmark, comprising over 45k real and tampered images across 16 languages, 10 tampering techniques, and diverse domains. Rich reasoning-style annotations are included, allowing for comprehensive assessment. Our TFR benchmark simultaneously addresses seven major limitations of existing benchmarks and enables robust evaluation under cross-style, cross-method, and cross-language conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextShield-R1 significantly advances the state of the art in interpretable tampered text detection.

Emotion plays a pivotal role in video-based expression, but existing video generation systems predominantly focus on low-level visual metrics while neglecting affective dimensions. Although emotion analysis has made progress in the visual domain, the video community lacks dedicated resources to bridge emotion understanding with generative tasks, particularly for stylized and non-realistic contexts. To address this gap, we introduce EmoVid, the first multimodal, emotion-annotated video dataset specifically designed for artistic media, which includes cartoon animations, movie clips, and animated stickers. Each video is annotated with emotion labels, visual attributes (brightness, colorfulness, hue), and text captions. Through systematic analysis, we uncover spatial and temporal patterns linking visual features to emotional perceptions across diverse video forms. Building on these insights, we develop an emotion-conditioned video generation technique by fine-tuning the Wan2.1 model. The results show a significant improvement in both quantitative metrics and the visual quality of generated videos for text-to-video and image-to-video tasks. EmoVid establishes a new benchmark and protocol for affective video computing. Our work not only offers valuable insights into visual emotion analysis in artistic videos but also provides practical methods for enhancing emotional expression in video generation. The extended version and the dataset are available on our project page.