Singapore

Recent advances in Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) have been largely driven by supervised learning on curated datasets, where each expression is assumed to refer to exactly one known object. However, such assumptions rarely hold in real-world scenarios, where expressions can refer to multiple objects, fail to refer to any, or involve novel categories and complex semantics. These challenges define the task of open-world REC, which demands robust generalization and structured reasoning beyond the scope of traditional REC methods. 
In this work, we introduce a novel, training-free framework that decouples visual perception from linguistic reasoning to address open-world REC in a zero-shot setting. Our method first transforms the visual scene into a rich textual representation using an open-vocabulary multimodal perception module. 
It then employs a reasoning language model to interpret the referring expression and perform explicit logical inference over the perceived scene, enabling transparent decision-making and strong generalization in open-world scenarios. 
Experiments on three standard REC benchmarks as well as two more challenging ones, gRefCOCO and D$^3$, demonstrate that our framework achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance, often surpassing supervised baselines.

AAAI 2026

From Pixels to Logic: A Perception-Reasoning Decomposition Framework for Open-World Referring Expression Comprehension

nlp: language grounding & multi-modal nlp

cv: visual reasoning & symbolic representations

cv: language and vision

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models
have demonstrated impressive generalization for robotic manipulation. However, these models often operate by directly
mapping visual and linguistic inputs to subsequent actions, lacking intermediate task planning, along with failure detection and recovery ability. These limitations prevent them from effectively decomposing complex tasks, recognizing problems,
and correcting erroneous actions, ultimately resulting in complete task failure. This significantly hinders their ability to
perform long-horizon tasks and generalization ability. To this end, we introduce TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thought, a
unified VLA framework that enhances this direct mapping with trajectory planning as well as failure detection and recovery. TCoT leverages hierarchy trajectories as a precise and compact representation of CoT reasoning for manipulation:
global planning provides a high-level, goal-oriented trajectory to guide the robot toward its task objective, while local
planning focuses on real-time adjustments to address dynamic
changes. Moreover, we designed the Global-Local Switching Recovery algorithm that detects and effectively recovers
from failures. Experimental results reveal that TCoT surpasses the state-of-the-art methods across both real and simulated
scenarios and exhibits superior generalization capabilities. 
Code is available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TCoT-AB42

TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thoughts for Robotic Manipulation with Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Model

Accurate 3D instance segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D instance segmentation based on 2D-to-3D lifting approaches struggles to produce precise instance-level segmentation, due to accumulated errors introduced during the lifting process from ambiguous semantic guidance and insufficient depth constraints. 
To tackle these challenges, we propose Splitting and Growing reliable Semantic mask for high-fidelity 3D instance segmentation (SGS-3D), a novel framework that aims to improve segmentation accuracy by integrating geometric primitives and finely splitting reliable 3D semantic masks within the scene. 
Unlike existing approaches that directly rely on raw lifted masks and sacrifice segmentation accuracy, SGS-3D serves as a training-free refinement method that jointly fuses semantic and geometric information, enabling effective cooperation between the two levels of representation. 
Specifically, for semantic guidance, we introduce a mask filtering strategy that leverages the co-occurrence of 3D geometry primitives to identify and remove ambiguous masks, thereby ensuring more reliable semantic consistency with the 3D object instances. 
For the geometric refinement, we construct fine-grained object instances by exploiting both spatial continuity and high-level features, particularly in the case of interwoven objects. 
Experimental results on ScanNet200, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 demonstrate that SGS-3D substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained models, yielding high-fidelity object instances while maintaining strong generalization across diverse indoor and outdoor environments.

SGS-3D: High-Fidelity 3D Instance Segmentation via Reliable Semantic Mask Splitting and Growing

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to accurately localize street-view images through retrieval of corresponding geo-tagged satellite images. While prior works have achieved nearly perfect performance on certain standard datasets, their robustness in real-world corrupted environments remains under-explored. This oversight causes severe performance degradation or failure when images are affected by corruption such as blur or weather, significantly limiting practical deployment. To address this critical gap, we introduce MRGeo, the first systematic method designed for robust CVGL under corruption. MRGeo employs a hierarchical defense strategy that enhances the intrinsic quality of features and then enforces a robust geometric prior. Its core is the Spatial-Channel Enhancement Block (SCEB), which contains: (1) a Spatial Adaptive Representation Module (SARM) that models global and local features in parallel and uses a dynamic gating mechanism to arbitrate their fusion based on feature reliability; and (2) a Channel Calibration Module (CCM) that performs compensatory adjustments by modeling multi-granularity channel dependencies to counteract information loss. To prevent spatial misalignment under severe corruption, a Region-level Geometric Alignment Module (RGAM) imposes a geometric structure on the final descriptors, ensuring coarse-grained consistency. Comprehensive experiments on both robustness benchmark and standard datasets demonstrate that MRGeo not only achieves an average R@1 improvement of 2.92\% across three comprehensive robustness benchmarks (CVUSA-C-ALL, CVACT\_val-C-ALL, and CVACT\_test-C-ALL) but also establishes superior performance in cross-area evaluation, thereby demonstrating its robustness and generalization capability.

MRGeo: Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization of Corrupted Images via Spatial and Channel Feature Enhancement

Generating high-quality physically based rendering (PBR) materials is important to achieve realistic rendering in the downstream tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the intertwined effects of materials and lighting. While existing methods have made breakthroughs by incorporating material decomposition in the 3D generation pipeline, they tend to bake highlights into albedo and ignore spatially varying properties of metallicity and roughness. In this work, we present PBR3DGen, a two-stage mesh generation method with high-quality PBR materials that integrates the novel multi-view PBR material estimation model and a 3D PBR mesh reconstruction model. Specifically, PBR3DGen leverages vision language models (VLM) to guide multi-view diffusion, precisely capturing the spatial distribution and inherent attributes of reflective-metalness material. Additionally, we incorporate view-dependent illumination-aware conditions as pixel-aware priors to enhance spatially varying material properties. Furthermore, our reconstruction model reconstructs high-quality mesh with PBR materials. Experimental results demonstrate that PBR3DGen significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results for PBR estimation and mesh generation.

PBR3DGen: A VLM-Guided Mesh Generation with High-Quality PBR Texture

The generation of realistic LiDAR point clouds plays a crucial role in the development and evaluation of autonomous driving systems. Although recent methods for 3D LiDAR point cloud generation have shown significant improvements, they still face notable limitations, including the lack of sequential generation capabilities and the inability to produce accurately positioned foreground objects and realistic backgrounds. These shortcomings hinder their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce DriveLiDAR4D, a novel LiDAR generation pipeline consisting of multimodal conditions and a novel sequential noise prediction model LiDAR4DNet, capable of producing temporally consistent LiDAR scenes with highly controllable foreground objects and realistic backgrounds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address the sequential generation of LiDAR scenes with full scene manipulation capability in an end-to-end manner. We evaluated DriveLiDAR4D on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets, where we achieved an FRD score of 743.13 and an FVD score of 16.96 on the nuScenes dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, UniScene (Li et al. 2024), with an performance boost of 37.2% in FRD and 24.1% in FVD, respectively.

DriveLiDAR4D: Sequential and Controllable LiDAR Scene Generation for Autonomous Driving

Flow Matching has emerged as a powerful framework for learning continuous transformations between distributions, enabling high-fidelity generative modeling. This work introduces Symmetrical Flow Matching (SymmFlow), a new formulation that unifies semantic segmentation, classification, and image generation within a single model. Using a symmetric learning objective, SymmFlow models forward and reverse transformations jointly, ensuring bi-directional consistency, while preserving sufficient entropy for generative diversity. A new training objective is introduced to explicitly retain semantic information across flows, featuring efficient sampling while preserving semantic structure, allowing for one-step segmentation and classification without iterative refinement. Unlike previous approaches that impose strict one-to-one mapping between masks and images, SymmFlow generalizes to flexible conditioning, supporting both pixel-level and image-level class labels. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that SymmFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on semantic image synthesis, obtaining FID scores of 11.9 on CelebAMask-HQ and 7.0 on COCO-Stuff with only 25 inference steps. Additionally, it delivers competitive results on semantic segmentation and shows promising capabilities in classification tasks.

Symmetrical Flow Matching: Unified Image Generation, Segmentation, and Classification with Score-Based Generative Models

Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) aims to localize a spatio-temporal tube that corresponds to a given language query in an untrimmed video. This is a challenging task since it involves complex vision-language understanding and spatiotemporal reasoning. Recent works have explored weakly-supervised setting in STVG to eliminate reliance on fine-grained annotations like bounding boxes or temporal stamps. However, they typically 
follow a simple late-fusion manner, which generates tubes independent of the text description, often resulting in failed target identification and inconsistent target tracking. 
To address this limitation, we propose a Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints (\textbf{TubeRMC}) framework that generates text-conditioned candidate tubes with pre-trained visual grounding models and further refine them via tube-conditioned reconstruction with spatio-temporal constraints. Specifically, we design three reconstruction strategies from temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal perspectives to comprehensively capture rich tube-text correspondences. Each strategy is equipped with a Tube-conditioned Reconstructor, utilizing spatio-temporal tubes as condition to reconstruct the key clues in the query. We further introduce mutual constraints between spatial and temporal proposals to enhance their quality for reconstruction. TubeRMC outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks VidSTG and HCSTVG. Further visualization shows that TubeRMC effectively mitigates both target identification errors and inconsistent tracking. Code will be released.

TubeRMC: Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints for Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Multi-modal learning integrating medical images and tabular data has significantly advanced clinical decision-making in recent years. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining these models on large-scale unlabeled image-tabular data, aiming to learn discriminative representations. However, existing SSL methods for image-tabular representation learning are often confined to specific data cohorts, mainly due to their rigid tabular modeling mechanisms when modeling heterogeneous tabular data. This inter-tabular barrier hinders the multi-modal SSL methods from effectively learning transferrable medical knowledge shared across diverse cohorts. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL framework, namely CITab, designed to learn powerful multi-modal feature representations in a cross-tabular manner. We design the tabular modeling mechanism from a semantic-awareness perspective by integrating column headers as semantic cues, which facilitates transferrable knowledge learning and the scalability in utilizing multiple data sources for pretraining. Additionally, we propose a prototype-guided mixture-of-linear layer (P-MoLin) module for tabular feature specialization, empowering the model to effectively handle the heterogeneity of tabular data and explore the underlying medical concepts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on Alzheimer's disease diagnosis task across three publicly available data cohorts containing 4,461 subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that CITab outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for effective and scalable cross-tabular multi-modal learning.

Unleashing the Power of Image-Tabular Self-Supervised Learning via Breaking Cross-Tabular Barriers

Collaborative reasoning with multiple agents offers the potential for more robust and diverse problem-solving. However, existing approaches often suffer from homogeneous agent behaviors and lack of reflective and rethinking capabilities. We propose Multi-Agent Personality Shaping ((MAPS), a novel framework that enhances reasoning through agent diversity and internal critique. Inspired by the Big Five personality theory, MAPS assigns distinct personality traits to individual agents, shaping their reasoning styles and promoting heterogeneous collaboration. To enable deeper and more adaptive reasoning, MAPS introduces a Critic agent that reflects on intermediate outputs, revisits flawed steps, and guides iterative refinement. This integration of personality-driven agent design and structured collaboration improves both reasoning depth and flexibility. Empirical evaluations across three benchmarks demonstrate the strong performance of MAPS, with further analysis confirming its generalizability across different large language models and validating the benefits of multi-agent collaboration.

MAPS: Multi-Agent Personality Shaping for Collaborative Reasoning

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks, particularly due to overconfident predictions on unseen OOD samples during testing. We reveal a key insight: OOD samples predicted as the same class, or given high probabilities for it, are visually more similar to each other than to the true in-distribution (ID) samples. Motivated by this class-specific observation, we propose DCAC (Dynamic Class-Aware Cache), a training-free, test-time calibration module that maintains separate caches for each ID class to collect high-entropy samples and calibrate the raw predictions of input samples. DCAC leverages cached visual features and predicted probabilities through a lightweight two-layer module to mitigate overconfident predictions on OOD samples. This module can be seamlessly integrated with various existing OOD detection methods across both unimodal and vision-language models while introducing minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple OOD benchmarks demonstrate that DCAC significantly enhances existing methods, achieving substantial improvements, i.e., reducing FPR95 by 6.55\% when integrated with ASH-S on ImageNet OOD benchmark.

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TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thoughts for Robotic Manipulation with Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Model

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Referring Expression Comprehension Using Language Adaptive Inference