AAAI 2026 Papers

Epilepsy is a widespread neurological disorder characterized by highly patient-specific EEG patterns. Existing EEG-based seizure detection methods either train individualized models for each patient or adapt models pre-trained on known patients to new ones. However, when encountering previously unseen patients, these methods typically require retraining or fine-tuning, which limits their practical utility in clinical settings. This limitation can be linked to biases caused by patient-specific variations, which obscure the underlying pathological patterns of seizures. To address this, we propose an evidential multi-view framework that reinforces the learning of core epileptic features by promoting consistency across multiple views and reducing reliance on high-uncertainty, patient-specific segments. Specifically, we introduce Bias-guided Fisher-Evidential Multi-View Learning (BF-EML) to guide the model toward discovering intrinsic seizure patterns. BF-EML employs a two-stage training architecture: In Stage 1, we use the Fisher Information Matrix to reorder EEG segments by uncertainty and deliberately train a biased feature generator on low-evidence segments. In Stage 2, we design a dual-branch network where the biased and unbiased branches are alternately trained, encouraging the unbiased branch to reduce its reliance on patient-specific biases. Finally, we introduce a shift-calibrated fusion strategy to enhance the consistency of pathogenic feature integration. Extensive experiments on public datasets and a clinical dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both single- and multi-patient scenarios. Importantly, it generalizes well to unseen patients without the need for retraining.

To protect clients' right to be forgotten in federated learning, federated unlearning aims to remove the data contribution of leaving clients from the global learned model. While current studies mainly focused on enhancing unlearning efficiency and effectiveness, the crucial aspects of efficiency fairness and performance fairness among decentralized clients during unlearning have remained largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce FedShard, the first federated unlearning algorithm designed to concurrently guarantee both efficiency fairness and performance fairness. FedShard adaptively addresses the challenges introduced by dilemmas among convergence, unlearning efficiency, and unlearning fairness. Furthermore, we propose two novel metrics to quantitatively assess the fairness of unlearning algorithms, which we prove to satisfy well-known properties in other existing fairness measurements. Our theoretical analysis and numerical evaluation validate FedShard's fairness in terms of both unlearning performance and efficiency. We demonstrate that FedShard mitigates unfairness risks such as cascaded leaving and poisoning attacks and realizes more balanced unlearning costs among clients. Experimental results indicate that FedShard accelerates the data unlearning process 1.3-6.2 times faster than retraining from scratch and 4.9 times faster than the state-of-the-art exact unlearning methods.

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

Graph-based clustering algorithms aim to construct an affinity graph that accurately captures the intrinsic structure of a dataset. To achieve this goal, these algorithms often use the k-nearest-neighbor (k-nn) method to build a graph regularizer for the required affinity graph, enabling it to have a grouping effect. However, due to the complex nature of real-world data, the k-nn method often fails to capture the true neighborhood relationships of a dataset, which in turn limits the quality of the learned affinity graph. Motivated by the insight that a learned affinity graph itself can more effectively reflect the underlying data structure, we propose a new graph-based clustering method, termed Self-learned Graph Regression (SGR). Unlike traditional approaches, SGR constructs its graph regularizer directly from the affinity graph being learned, allowing the graph to adaptively capture more accurate structural information. To solve the proposed problem, we develop an optimization algorithm along with an acceleration strategy. We further analyze the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Extensive clustering experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art graph-based clustering algorithms.

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on natural language tasks, but their decision-making processes remain opaque. Existing explanation methods either suffer from limited faithfulness to the model's reasoning or produce explanations that are difficult for humans to understand. To address these challenges, we propose ProtoSurE, a novel prototype-based surrogate framework that provides faithful and understandable explanations for LLMs. ProtoSurE trains an interpretable-by-design surrogate model that aligns with the target LLM while utilizing sentence-level prototypes as understandable concepts. Extensive experiments show that ProtoSurE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art explanation methods across diverse LLMs and datasets. Importantly, ProtoSurE demonstrates strong data efficiency, requiring relatively few training examples to achieve good performance, making it practical for real-world applications.

Traditional Federated Multi-View Clustering assumes uniform views across clients, yet practical deployments reveal heterogeneous view completeness with prevalent incomplete, redundant, or corrupted data. While recent approaches model view heterogeneity, they neglect semantic conflicts from dynamic view combinations, failing to address dual uncertainties: view uncertainty (semantic inconsistency from arbitrary view pairings) and aggregation uncertainty (divergent client updates with imbalanced contributions). To address these, we propose a novel Enhanced Federated Deep Multi-View Clustering framework: first align local semantics, hierarchical contrastive fusion within clients resolves view uncertainty by eliminating semantic conflicts; a view adaptive drift module mitigates aggregation uncertainty through global-local prototype contrast that dynamically corrects parameter deviations; and a balanced aggregation mechanism coordinates client updates. Experimental results demonstrate that EFDMVC achieves superior robustness against heterogeneous uncertain views across multiple benchmark datasets, consistently outperforming all state-of-the-art baselines in comprehensive evaluations.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has demonstrated great promise for learning generalizable graph representations from unlabeled data. However, conventional GCL approaches face two critical limitations: (1) the restricted expressive capacity of multilayer perceptron (MLP) based encoders, and (2) suboptimal negative samples that either from random augmentations—failing to provide effective 'hard negatives'—or generated hard negatives without addressing the semantic distinctions crucial for discriminating graph data. To this end, we propose Khan-GCL, a novel framework that integrates the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) into the GCL encoder architecture, substantially enhancing its representational capacity. Furthermore, we exploit the rich information embedded within KAN coefficient parameters to develop two novel critical feature identification techniques that enable the generation of semantically meaningful hard negative samples for each graph representation. These strategically constructed hard negatives guide the encoder to learn more discriminative features by emphasizing critical semantic differences between graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing GCL methods across a variety of datasets and tasks.

As industrial manufacturing scales, automating fine-grained product image analysis has become critical for quality control. However, existing approaches are hindered by limited dataset coverage and poor model generalization across diverse and complex anomaly patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce MAU-Set, a comprehensive dataset for Multi-type industrial Anomaly Understanding. It spans multiple industrial domains and features a hierarchical task structure, ranging from binary classification to complex reasoning. Alongside this dataset, we establish a rigorous evaluation protocol to facilitate fair and comprehensive model assessment. Building upon this foundation, we further present MAU-GPT, a domain-adapted multimodal large model specifically designed for industrial anomaly understanding. It incorporates a novel AMoE-LoRA mechanism that unifies anomaly-aware and generalist experts adaptation, enhancing both understanding and reasoning across diverse defect classes. Extensive experiments show that MAU-GPT consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods across all domains, demonstrating strong potential for scalable and automated industrial inspection.

Federated recommender system is emerging as a new paradigm for providing personalized services while preserving user data privacy. Most existing personalized federated recommender systems predict the user's next item by discretely training user and item embeddings. However, this training approach overlooks the user's behavioral patterns, suffers from low interpretability, and requires a substantial amount of data and meticulous fine-tuning to achieve stable and accurate embeddings. To address these limitations, we propose Federated Context-Aware Personalized Recommendation (FedCAR), a novel framework that leverages users’ recent interactions as behavioral context to guide prediction. Instead of static user embeddings, FedCAR dynamically constructs context representations by aggregating and weighting recently interacted item embeddings. Additionally, we incorporate a contrastive learning strategy that enables the model to capture shared behavioral structures across clients while maintaining personalized preferences, enhancing both generalization and robustness in heterogeneous settings. Experiments on 5 benchmark datasets show that FedCAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and provides interpretable recommendations by explicitly modeling context dependencies.

Multiphase flow simulation is critical in science and engineering but incurs high computational costs due to complex field discontinuities and the need for high-resolution numerical meshes. While Neural Operators (NOs) offer an efficient alternative for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), they struggle with two core challenges unique to multiphase systems: spectral bias caused by spatial heterogeneity at phase interfaces, and the persistent scarcity of expensive, high-resolution field data. This work introduces the Interface Information Aware Neural Operator (IANO), a novel architecture that mitigates these issues by leveraging readily obtainable interface data (e.g., topology and position). Interface data inherently contains the high-frequency features not only necessary to complement the physical field data, but also help with spectral bias. IANO incorporates an interface-aware function encoding mechanism to capture dynamic coupling, and a geometry-aware positional encoding method to enhance spatial fidelity for pointwise super-resolution. Empirical results across multiple multiphase flow cases demonstrate that IANO achieves significant accuracy improvements (up to ~10%) over existing NO baselines. Furthermore, IANO exhibits superior generalization capabilities in low-data and noisy settings, confirming its utility for practical, data-efficient AI-based multiphase flow simulations.

The Dual Diffusion Implicit Bridge (DDIB) is an emerging image-to-image (I2I) translation method that preserves cycle consistency while achieving strong flexibility. It links two independently trained diffusion models (DMs) in the source and target domains by first adding noise to a source image to obtain a latent code, then denoising it in the target domain to generate the translated image. However, this method faces two key challenges: (1) low translation efficiency, and (2) translation trajectory deviations caused by mismatched latent distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel I2I translation framework, OT-ALD, grounded in optimal transport (OT) theory, which retains the strengths of DDIB-based approach. Specifically, we compute an OT map from the latent distribution of the source domain to that of the target domain, and use the mapped distribution as the starting point for the reverse diffusion process in the target domain. Our error analysis confirms that OT-ALD eliminates latent distribution mismatches. Moreover, OT-ALD effectively balances faster image translation with improved image quality. Experiments on four translation tasks across three high-resolution datasets show that OT-ALD improves sampling efficiency by 20.29% and reduces the FID score by 2.6 on average compared to the top-performing baseline models.

We introduce a one-step generative policy for offline reinforcement learning that maps *noise* directly to *actions* via a *residual reformulation* of MeanFlow, making it compatible with Q-learning. While one-step Gaussian policies enable fast inference, they struggle to capture complex, multimodal action distributions. Existing flow-based methods improve expressivity but typically rely on distillation and two-stage training when trained with Q-learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose to reformulate MeanFlow to enable *direct noise-to-action generation* by integrating the velocity field and noise-to-action transformation into a single policy network—eliminating the need for separate velocity estimation. We explore several reformulation variants and identify an effective *residual formulation* that supports expressive and stable policy learning. Our method offers three key advantages: 1) efficient one-step noise-to-action generation, 2) expressive modelling of multimodal action distributions, and 3) efficient and stable policy learning via Q-learning in a single-stage training setup. Extensive experiments on 73 tasks across the OGBench and D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance in both offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning settings.

Segment Anything Model (SAM) struggles in open-world scenarios with diverse domains. In such settings, naive fine-tuning with a well-designed learning module is inadequate and often causes catastrophic forgetting issue when learning incrementally. To address this issue, we propose a novel continual learning (CL) method for SAM, termed SAMCL. Rather than relying on a fixed learning module, our method decomposes incremental knowledge into separate modules and trains a selector to choose the appropriate one during inference. However, this intuitive design introduces two key challenges: ensuring effective module learning and selection, and managing storage as tasks accumulate. To tackle these, we introduce two components: AugModule and Module Selector. AugModule reduces the storage of the popular LoRA learning module by sharing parameters across layers while maintaining accuracy. It also employs heatmaps—generated from point prompts—to further enhance domain adaptation with minimal additional cost. Module Selector leverages the observation that SAM’s embeddings can effectively distinguish domains, enabling high selection accuracy by training on low-consumed embeddings instead of raw images. Experiments show that SAMCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving only 0.19% forgetting and at least 2.5% gain on unseen domains. Each AugModule requires just 0.233 MB, reducing storage by at least 24.3% over other fine-tuning approaches. The buffer storage for Module Selector is further reduced by up to 256x.

Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) aims to generalize over unseen target domains containing open classes, and the core challenge lies in identifying unknown samples never encountered during training. Recently, CLIP has exhibited impressive performance in OSDG, while it still falls into the dilemma between structural risk of known classes and open space risk from unknown classes, and easily suffers from over-confidence, especially when distinguishing known-like unknown samples. To this end, we propose a Semantic-enhanced CLIP (SeeCLIP) framework that leverages fine-grained semantics to boost unknown detection, so as to accommodate both risks and enable precise discrimination among categories. In SeeCLIP, we propose a semantic-aware prompt enhancement module to extract fine-grained key semantic features, and establish a fine-grained vision-language alignment. Duplex contrastive learning is proposed for prompt learning, which jointly optimizes duplex losses such that the unknown prompt is similar to known prompts, yet exhibits key semantic differences. We also design a semantic-guided diffusion module to enable nuanced capture in generation. By injecting perturbed key semantics into a diffusion model as control conditions, it generates the closest unknowns or pseudo-open samples with high similarity yet low belongingness to known classes. We formulate a generalization bound for OSDG, and show that SeeCLIP can achieve a lower generalization risk. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of SeeCLIP, it outperforms the SOTA methods by nearly 3% on accuracy and 5% on H-index, respectively.

In an ideal medical environment, real-time coagulation monitoring can enable early detection and prompt remediation of risks. However, traditional Thromboelastography (TEG), a widely employed diagnostic modality, can only provide such outputs after nearly 1 hour of measurement. The delay might lead to elevated mortality rates. These issues clearly point out one of the key challenges for medical AI development: Making reasonable predictions based on very small data sets and accounting for variation between different patient populations, a task where conventional deep learning methods typically perform poorly. We present Physiological State Reconstruction (PSR), a new algorithm specifically designed to take advantage of dynamic changes between individuals and to maximize useful information produced by small amounts of clinical data through mapping to reliable predictions and diagnosis. We develop MDFE to facilitate integration of varied temporal signals using multi-domain learning, and jointly learn high-level temporal interactions together with attentions via HLA; furthermore, the parameterized DAM we designed maintains the stability of the computed vital signs. PSR evaluates with 4 TEG-specialized data sets and establishes remarkable performance -- predictions of R^2 > 0.98 for coagulation traits and error reduction around half compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and halving the inferencing time too. Drift-aware learning suggests a new future, with potential uses well beyond thrombophilia discovery towards medical AI applications with data scarcity.

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in binary post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques for large language models (LLMs). While state-of-the-art (SOTA) binary quantization methods significantly reduce memory footprint and computational demands, they introduce additional memory overhead beyond binary weight tensors to mitigate performance degradation. Moreover, binary LLMs still suffer from substantial accuracy loss. To address these limitations, we propose MemeBQ, a novel binary PTQ framework for LLMs that reduces the memory overhead of auxiliary flag bitmaps in existing binary quantization methods. Specifically, we first design a greedy row clustering method, which leverages the similarity between the row vectors of weights to partition the weight rows into different groups. By sharing the common flag bitmap within each row group, we significantly mitigate the memory overhead associated with flag bitmaps. Besides, to improve the performance of binary LLMs, we propose a novel weight splitting method for each row group of weights, which determines the flag bitmap's values in a fine-grained way. Extensive experiments on OPT, Llama-2, and Llama-3 models demonstrate that MemeBQ reduces 50% extra memory demand while achieving comparable accuracy compared with current SOTA methods. Alternatively, MemeBQ outperforms SOTA binary quantization methods up to 7% with the same extra bits on reasoning benchmarks.

Noisy correspondence, characterized by mismatches in cross-modal data pairs, presents a significant challenge for real-world applications. Current approaches primarily rely on direct cross-modal pairwise similarity metrics, which suffer from two critical limitations: noise sensitivity, where direct similarity calculations are easily corrupted by noisy or ambiguous instances, and contextual blindness, where isolated pairwise comparisons fail to exploit the rich semantic context embedded in neighboring instances. To address this issue, we propose to improve noise correspondence discrimination through a well-designed Dynamic Neighborhood Semantic association verification paradigm, namely DNS. Specifically, we hypothesize that the matching degree of current samples can be quantified through the interrelationships among their respective semantic neighbors. For this reason, we develop a novel semantic drift distance and local relation proximity based on dynamic neighborhood association. Furthermore, beyond implicit approaches to semantic gap modeling in cross-modal data, we introduce an explicit decomposition framework that disentangles the gap into the semantic orientation and scalar magnitude. Through the strategic integration of these proposed mechanisms, DNS achieves substantial enhancement in noisy correspondence discrimination, yielding remarkable performance gains. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions, demonstrate the superiority of DNS over state-of-the-art methods.

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) facilitates knowledge transfer from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs by learning domain-invariant representations, which is essential in applications such as molecular property prediction and social network analysis. However, most existing GDA methods rely on the assumption of clean source labels, which rarely holds in real-world scenarios where annotation noise is pervasive. This label noise severely impairs feature alignment and degrades adaptation performance under domain shifts. To address this challenge, we propose Nested Graph Pseudo-Label Refinement (NeGPR), a novel framework tailored for graph-level domain adaptation with noisy labels. NeGPR first pretrains dual branches, i.e., semantic and topology branches, by enforcing neighborhood consistency in the feature space, thereby reducing the influence of noisy supervision. To bridge domain gaps, NeGPR employs a nested refinement mechanism in which one branch selects high-confidence target samples to guide the adaptation of the other, enabling progressive cross-domain learning. Furthermore, since pseudo-labels may still contain noise and the pre-trained branches are already overfitted to the noisy labels in the source domain, NeGPR incorporates a noise-aware regularization strategy. This regularization is theoretically proven to mitigate the adverse effects of pseudo-label noise, even under the presence of source overfitting, thus enhancing the robustness of the adaptation process. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that NeGPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under severe label noise.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to transfer the dark knowledge that encodes inter-class similarity, semantic structure, and decision boundaries from a powerful teacher model to a compact student model by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between their output distributions. While effective, we demonstrate that KL-based KD is designed to match values precisely and does not explicitly constrain the relative relationships between classes. Meanwhile, we empirically find that vanilla KL-based KD suffers from gradient competition due to the zero-sum constraint in the softmax space, which may implicitly change the inter-class rank relationships learned by the student model, particularly under capacity mismatching. Therefore, we argue that the student model should learn not only the output values but also the relative ranking of classes. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet effective Relative Confidence Knowledge Distillation (RCKD) method that aligns the teacher’s and student’s relative confidence matrices via cosine similarity, achieving more efficient and robust distillation from a stronger teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCKD consistently outperforms existing logit-based KD methods and exhibits strong adaptability across various teacher architectures and capacities.