AAAI 2026 Papers

Despite remarkable advancements in supervised pansharpening neural networks, these methods face domain adaptation challenges of resolution due to the intrinsic disparity between simulated reduced-resolution training data and real-world full-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose an unsupervised pansharpening framework, CLIPPan, that enables model training at full resolution directly by taking CLIP, a visual-language model, as a supervisor. However, directly applying CLIP to supervise pansharpening remains challenging due to its inherent bias toward natural images and limited understanding of pansharpening tasks. Therefore, we first introduce a lightweight fine-tuning pipeline that adapts CLIP to recognize low-resolution multispectral, panchromatic, and high-resolution multispectral images, as well as to understand the pansharpening process. Then, building on the adapted CLIP, we formulate a novel loss integrating semantic language constraints, which aligns image-level fusion transitions with protocol-aligned textual prompts (e.g., Wald's or Khan's descriptions), thus enabling CLIPPan to use language as a powerful supervisory signal and guide fusion learning without ground truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLIPPan consistently improves spectral and spatial fidelity across various pansharpening backbones on real-world datasets, setting a new state of the art for unsupervised full-resolution pansharpening.

Dense video captioning jointly localizes and captions salient events in untrimmed videos. Recent methods primarily focus on leveraging additional prior knowledge and advanced multi-task architectures to achieve competitive performance. However, these pipelines rely on implicit modeling that uses frame-level or fragmented video features, failing to capture the temporal coherence across event sequences and comprehensive semantics within visual contexts. To address this, we propose an explicit temporal-semantic modeling framework called Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction (CACMI), which leverages both latent temporal characteristics within videos and linguistic semantics from text corpus. Specifically, our model consists of two core components: Cross-modal Frame Aggregation aggregates relevant frames to extract temporally coherent, event-aligned textual features through cross-modal retrieval; and Context-aware Feature Enhancement utilizes query-guided attention to integrate visual dynamics with pseudo-event semantics. Extensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets demonstrate that CACMI achieves the state-of-the-art performance on dense video captioning task.

Dynamic driving scene reconstruction is of great importance in fields like digital twin system and autonomous driving simulation. However, unacceptable degradation occurs when the view deviates from the input trajectory, leading to corrupted background and vehicle models. To improve reconstruction quality on novel trajectory, existing methods are subject to various limitations including inconsistency, deformation, and time consumption. This paper proposes LidarPainter, a one-step diffusion model that recovers consistent driving views from sparse LiDAR condition and artifact-corrupted renderings in real-time, enabling high-fidelity lane shifts in driving scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that LidarPainter outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speed, quality and resource efficiency, specifically 7 × faster than StreetCrafter with only one fifth of GPU memory required. LidarPainter also supports stylized generation using text prompts such as “foggy” and “night”, allowing for a diverse expansion of the existing asset library.

Event cameras provide microsecond latency and high dynamic range, making them ideal for 3D perception tasks in traffic scenes with challenging lighting conditions. Yet existing methods often struggle to generalize to out-of-domain environments due to the limited availability of diverse training data. While synthetic data offers an easily accessible alternative, it introduces a significant sim-to-real gap, particularly in motion patterns. We tackle this challenge by introducing Motion-Adaptation Mamba (MA-Mamba), a dual-track framework that advances both architecture and data augmentation. At the architectural level, we introduce a lightweight Spatio-Temporal Association module that captures motion-induced appearance variations at arbitrary scales, and an Adaptive Memory Balancing module, built on the Mamba state-space framework, that adaptively filters memory updates to maintain stable scene context under diverse dynamics. At the data level, we design event-oriented augmentations that simulate varied motion patterns and apply priority-based masked sequence modeling to strengthen long-range spatio-temporal reasoning. Trained solely on synthetic data, MA-Mamba delivers substantial zero-shot gains on multiple real-world benchmarks, demonstrating strong robustness and generalizability.

Dataset distillation (DD) aims to generate a compact synthetic dataset that enables efficient training of neural networks while maintaining performance comparable to that achieved with the original dataset. However, existing methods often suffer from two main limitations. They either rely on computationally intensive iterative optimization procedures or depend heavily on architecture-specific designs. These issues limit their practicality for large-scale datasets and hinder generalization across different model architectures. To overcome these challenges, recent research has explored the use of diffusion models as an architecture-agnostic approach to dataset distillation, offering improved scalability and generalization for large-scale datasets across diverse model architectures. While diffusion-based dataset distillation methods have shown considerable potential, several challenges remain. Notably, certain approaches exhibit a distributional mismatch between the pre-trained diffusion model and the target dataset, which can adversely affect the fidelity and representativeness of the generated samples. Others require substantial fine-tuning to achieve high fidelity, which negates the benefits of architectural flexibility. In this work, we propose a new diffusion-based dataset distillation framework that effectively preserves the characteristics of the original dataset without requiring any fine-tuning. Our method employs adaptive sampling and repulsion regularization to enhance both the fidelity and diversity of generated samples. As a result, the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art distillation methods across a wide range of datasets and model architectures.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising approach for 3D reconstruction, providing explicit, point-based representations and enabling high-quality real-time rendering. However, when trained with sparse input views, 3DGS suffers from overfitting and structural degradation, leading to poor generalization on novel views. This limitation arises from its optimization relying solely on photometric loss without incorporating any 3D structure priors. To address this issue, we propose Coherent supergaussian Modeling with Spatial Priors (COSMOS). Inspired by the concept of superpoints from 3D segmentation, COSMOS introduces 3D structure priors by newly defining supergaussian groupings of Gaussians based on local geometric cues and appearance features. To this end, COSMOS applies inter-group global self-attention across supergaussian groups and sparse local attention among individual Gaussians, enabling the integration of global and local spatial information. These structure-aware features are then used for predicting Gaussian attributes, facilitating more consistent 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, by leveraging supergaussian-based grouping, COSMOS enforces an intra-group positional regularization to maintain structural coherence and suppress floaters, thereby enhancing training stability under sparse-view conditions. Our experiments on Blender and DTU show that COSMOS surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods in sparse‑view settings without any external depth supervision.

Active Label Correction (ALC) has emerged as a promising solution to the high cost and error-prone nature of manual pixel-wise annotation in semantic segmentation, by actively identifying and correcting mislabeled data. Although recent work has improved correction efficiency by generating pseudo-labels using foundation models, substantial inefficiencies still remain. In this paper, we introduce A²LC, an Active and Automated Label Correction framework for semantic segmentation, where manual and automatic correction stages operate in a cascaded manner. Specifically, the automatic correction stage leverages human feedback to extend label corrections beyond the queried samples, thereby maximizing cost efficiency. In addition, we introduce an adaptively balanced acquisition function that emphasizes underrepresented tail classes, working in strong synergy with the automatic correction stage. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 demonstrate that A²LC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Notably, A²LC exhibits high efficiency by outperforming previous methods with only 20% of their budget, and shows strong effectiveness by achieving a 27.23% performance gain under the same budget on Cityscapes.

Zero-shot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality’s representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called Granularity-Aware Alignment (GranAlign), that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23% mAP@avg improvement on the QVHighlights dataset.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced visual reasoning, a key capability for embodied AI agents like robots. However, existing visual reasoning benchmarks often suffer from several limitations: they lack a clear definition of reasoning complexity, offer have no control to generate questions over varying difficulty and task customization, and fail to provide structured, step-by-step reasoning annotations (workflows). To bridge these gaps, we formalize reasoning complexity, introduce an adaptive query engine that generates customizable questions of varying complexity with detailed intermediate annotations, and extend the JRDB dataset with human-object interaction and geometric relationship annotations to create JRDB-Reasoning, a benchmark tailored for visual reasoning in human-crowded environments. Our engine and benchmark enable fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning frameworks and dynamic assessment of visual-language models across reasoning levels.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across vision-language tasks. Recent advancements allow these models to process multiple images as inputs. However, the vulnerabilities of multi-image MLLMs remain unexplored. Existing adversarial attacks focus on single-image settings and often assume a white-box threat model which is impractical in many real-world scenarios. This paper introduces LAMP, a black-box method for learning UAPs targeting multi-image MLLMs. LAMP applies an attention-based constraint that which prevents the model from effectively aggregating information across images. LAMP also introduces a novel cross-image contagious constraint that forces perturbed tokens to influence clean tokens to spread adversarial effects without requiring all inputs to be modified. Additionally, an index-attention suppression loss creates a robust position invariant attack. Experimental results show that LAMP outperforms SOTA baselines and achieves the highest attack success rates across multiple vision-language tasks.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been applied to autonomous driving to support decision-making in complex real-world scenarios. However, their training on static, web-sourced image-text pairs fundamentally limits the precise spatiotemporal reasoning required to understand and predict dynamic traffic scenes. We address this critical gap with STRIDE-QA, a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset for physically grounded reasoning from an ego-centric perspective. Constructed from 100 hours of multi-sensor driving data in Tokyo, capturing diverse and challenging conditions, STRIDE-QA is the largest VQA dataset for spatiotemporal reasoning in urban driving, offering 16 M QA pairs over 270 K frames. Grounded by dense, automatically generated annotations including 3D bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and multi-object tracks, the dataset uniquely supports both object-centric and ego-centric reasoning through three novel QA tasks that require spatial localization and temporal prediction. Our benchmarks demonstrate that existing VLMs struggle significantly, with near-zero scores on prediction consistency. In contrast, VLMs fine-tuned on STRIDE-QA exhibit dramatic performance gains, achieving 55% success in spatial localization and 28% consistency in future motion prediction, compared to near-zero scores from general-purpose VLMs. Therefore, STRIDE-QA establishes a comprehensive foundation for developing more reliable VLMs for safety-critical autonomous systems.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown impressive performance across a broad range of multimodal tasks. However, robust image caption evaluation using LVLMs remains challenging, particularly under domain-shift scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce the Distribution-Aware Score Decoder (DISCODE), a novel finetuning-free method that generates robust evaluation scores better aligned with human judgments across diverse domains. The core idea behind DISCODE lies in its test-time adaptive evaluation approach, which introduces the Adaptive Test-Time (ATT) loss, leveraging a Gaussian prior distribution to improve robustness in evaluation score estimation. This loss is efficiently minimized at test time using an analytical solution that we derive. Furthermore, we introduce the Multi-domain Caption Evaluation (MCEval) benchmark, a new image captioning evaluation benchmark covering six distinct domains, designed to assess the robustness of evaluation metrics. In our experiments, we demonstrate that DISCODE achieves state-of-the-art performance as a reference-free evaluation metric across MCEval and four representative existing benchmarks.

Global warming has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, which degrade CCTV signal and video quality while disrupting traffic flow, thereby increasing traffic accident rates. Existing datasets, often limited to light haze, rain, and snow, fail to capture extreme weather conditions. To address this gap, this study introduces the Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded vehicles under various Weather conditions (TSBOW), a comprehensive dataset designed to enhance occluded vehicle detection across diverse annual weather scenarios. Comprising over 32 hours of real-world traffic data from densely populated urban areas, TSBOW includes more than 48,000 manually annotated and 3.2 million semi-labeled frames; bounding boxes spanning eight traffic participant classes from large vehicles to micromobility devices and pedestrians. We establish an object detection benchmark for TSBOW, highlighting challenges posed by occlusions and adverse weather. With its varied road types, scales, and viewpoints, TSBOW serves as a critical resource for advancing Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our findings underscore the potential of CCTV-based traffic monitoring, pave the way for new research and applications. The TSBOW dataset is publicly available at the following link.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading framework for novel view synthesis, yet its core optimization challenges remain underexplored. We identify two key issues in 3DGS optimization: entrapment in suboptimal local optima and insufficient convergence quality. To address these, we propose Opt3DGS, a robust framework that enhances 3DGS through a two-stage optimization process of adaptive exploration and curvature-guided exploitation. In the exploration phase, an Adaptive Weighted Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) method enhances global search to escape local optima. In the exploitation phase, a Local Quasi-Newton Direction-guided Adam optimizer leverages curvature information for precise and efficient convergence. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that Opt3DGS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality by refining the 3DGS optimization process without modifying its underlying representation.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are vulnerable to language priors and dataset biases, often leading to spurious correlations between questions and answers. As a result, these models excessively rely on linguistic cues, neglecting essential visual information and causing representational distortions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Bayesian debiasing framework termed BayesVQA, which integrates three carefully designed mechanisms: Energy-guided Prior Variance (EPV), Energy-guided Posterior Sampling (EPS), and Energy-guided Likelihood Reweighting (ELR). Specifically, we explicitly decompose each sample's latent representation into a biased feature and a stochastic corrective perturbation δ. Using a Bayesian formulation, we model the posterior distribution of the perturbation δ conditioned on the predictive uncertainty, quantified via calibrated energy scores. To mitigate language bias, the posterior is optimized through energy-driven variational inference with an uncertainty-adaptive prior and sampling strategy. Moreover, the ELR mechanism incorporates an energy-based weighting of the reconstruction objective and enforces an energy-coherence constraint to emphasize challenging, high-uncertainty instances and align model confidence before and after debiasing. Extensive experiments conducted across multiple standard VQA benchmarks consistently validate the superior performance of our BayesVQA method over state-of-the-art competitors under distributional shifts and challenging bias conditions.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal understanding, yet they remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Among various strategies, transfer-based attacks are notably effective, especially in black-box scenarios. The dominant approach within this paradigm leverages generative models to create image targets from text, consistently outperforming text-only methods. However, this approach suffers from a fundamental limitation: generative models introduce visual features irrelevant or even detrimental to textual semantics, misguiding optimization. To investigate this limitation, we conduct comprehensive analysis revealing two critical findings. First, optimal attack directions lie in synergistic spaces between image and text gradients, demonstrating that text provides complementary information. Second, widespread gradient conflicts occur when combining modalities, where image-target gradients oppose text-target directions. This conflict provides direct evidence that extraneous visual information actively harms optimization, driving it away from intended textual objectives. Based on these insights, we propose Text-Guided Gradient Refinement (TGGR), a novel framework that employs a conflict-aware projection mechanism to resolve this conflict. TGGR preserves the beneficial characteristics of image targets by decomposing the image gradient and surgically removing components that oppose the textual guidance. Extensive experiments on models such as LLaVA and GPT-4o demonstrate that TGGR substantially improves attack success rates. Specifically, on GPT-4o, TGGR yields an improvement of up to 14% over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 96% attack success rate. Our work offers a principled framework for developing more synergistic and effective adversarial strategies against VLMs.

3D scene graph generation is a pivotal task in scene understanding. Its performance is easy to be constrained by the limited availability of annotated data. Currently, the existing solutions on point cloud pre-training usually emphasize on object-centric representations while neglecting the predicate feature learning. This limitation significantly hinders their relational reasoning capabilities, as inter-object relationships are fundamentally governed by predicate features. To enhance 3D Scene Graphs Pre-training, this paper proposes a task-specific Multi-view Invariance Learning framework with Collaborative Cross-modal Regularization. In detail, the inherent horizontal-rotation invariance of 3D objects and their semantic relationships are leveraged to construct a self-supervised paradigm for triplet feature learning. Moreover, our framework harnesses the cross-modal prior knowledge from the vision-language model to regularize model optimization. It could further achieve the semantic discrimination via unsupervised deep clustering. To resolve the knowledge discrepancies arising from the pre-trained model in fine-tuning, a predicate adapter equipped with knowledge filtering gate is devised to selectively aggregate the predicate features of pre-trained model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework is effective in boosting 3D scene graph generation performance, surpassing state-of-the-art ones.

Deep neural networks have recently achieved notable progress in 3D point cloud recognition, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations poses critical security challenges in practical deployments. Conventional defense mechanisms struggle to address the evolving landscape of multifaceted attack patterns. Through systematic analysis of existing defenses, we identify that their unsatisfactory performance primarily originates from an entangled feature space, where adversarial attacks can be performed easily. To this end, we present 3D-ANC, a novel approach that capitalizes on the Neural Collapse (NC) mechanism to orchestrate discriminative feature learning. In particular, NC depicts where last-layer features and classifier weights jointly evolve into a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) arrangement, establishing maximally separable class prototypes. However, leveraging this advantage in 3D recognition confronts two substantial challenges: (1) prevalent class imbalance in point cloud datasets, and (2) complex geometric similarities between object categories. To tackle these obstacles, our solution combines an ETF-aligned classification module with an adaptive training framework consisting of representation-balanced learning (RBL) and dynamic feature direction loss (FDL). 3D-ANC seamlessly empowers existing models to develop disentangled feature spaces despite the complexity in 3D data distribution. Comprehensive evaluations state that 3D-ANC significantly improves the robustness of models with various structures on two datasets. For instance, DGCNN's classification accuracy is elevated from 27.2% to 80.9% on ModelNet40 -- a 53.7% absolute gain that surpasses leading baselines by 34.0%.

The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zero-shot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose WeSTAR, a parameter-efficient framework that performs \textbf{We}akly supervised \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{T}raining \textbf{A}daptation with \textbf{R}egularization, designed to enhance the robustness of MDE foundation models in unseen and diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that WeSTAR consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.