Singapore

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), as valuable intellectual property, face unauthorized use. Existing protections, such as digital watermarking, are largely passive; they provide only post-hoc ownership verification and cannot actively prevent the illicit use of a stolen model. This work proposes a proactive protection scheme, dubbed ``Authority backdoors,&quot; which embeds access constraints directly into the model. In particular, the scheme utilizes a backdoor learning framework to intrinsically lock a model&#39;s utility, such that it performs normally only in the presence of a specific trigger (e.g., a hardware fingerprint). But in its absence, the DNN&#39;s performance degrades to be useless. To further enhance the security of the proposed authority scheme, the certified robustness is integrated to prevent an adaptive attacker from removing the implanted backdoor. The resulting framework establishes a provably secure authority mechanism for DNNs, combining access control with robustness guarantees against adversarial attacks. 
Extensive experiments on diverse architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. $\textit{The source code for our framework will be made available upon publication.}$

AAAI 2026

Authority Backdoor: A Certifiable Backdoor Mechanism for Authoring DNNs

app: security

ml: adversarial learning & robustness

robustness & trustworthiness

peai: safety

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.<br><br>

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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.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), as valuable intellectual property, face unauthorized use. Existing protections, such as digital watermarking, are largely passive; they provide only post-hoc ownership verification and cannot actively prevent the illicit use of a stolen model. This work proposes a proactive protection scheme, dubbed ``Authority backdoors," which embeds access constraints directly into the model. In particular, the scheme utilizes a backdoor learning framework to intrinsically lock a model's utility, such that it performs normally only in the presence of a specific trigger (e.g., a hardware fingerprint). But in its absence, the DNN's performance degrades to be useless. To further enhance the security of the proposed authority scheme, the certified robustness is integrated to prevent an adaptive attacker from removing the implanted backdoor. The resulting framework establishes a provably secure authority mechanism for DNNs, combining access control with robustness guarantees against adversarial attacks. 
Extensive experiments on diverse architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. $\textit{The source code for our framework will be made available upon publication.}$

poster

Visual generative models have achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing photorealistic images and videos, yet aligning their outputs with human preferences across critical dimensions remains a persistent challenge.
Though reinforcement learning from human feedback offers promise for preference alignment, existing reward models for visual generation face limitations, including black-box scoring without interpretability and potentially resultant unexpected biases.
We present VisionReward, a general framework for learning human visual preferences in both image and video generation.
Specifically, we employ a hierarchical visual assessment framework to capture fine-grained human preferences, and leverages linear weighting to enable interpretable preference learning.
Furthermore, we propose a multi-dimensional consistent strategy when using VisionReward as a reward model during preference optimization for visual generation.
Experiments show that VisionReward can significantly outperform existing image and video reward models on both machine metrics and human evaluation.
Notably, VisionReward surpasses VideoScore by 17.2\% in preference prediction accuracy, and text-to-video models with VisionReward achieve a 31.6\% higher pairwise win rate compared to the same models using VideoScore.
The models and dataset will be open-sourced.

VisionReward: Fine-Grained Multi-Dimensional Human Preference Learning for Image and Video Generation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have gained widespread attention for their strong zero-shot capabilities across numerous downstream tasks. However, these models assume that each test image’s class label is drawn from a predefined label set and lack a reliable mechanism to reject samples from emerging unknown classes when only unlabeled data are available. To address this gap, open-set domain adaptation methods retrain models to push potential unknowns away from known clusters. Yet, some unknown samples remain stably anchored to specific known classes in the VLM feature space due to semantic relevance, which is termed as emantic Affinity Anchoring (SAA). Forcibly repelling these samples unavoidably distorts the native geometry of VLMs and degrades performance. Meanwhile, existing score‑based unknown detectors use simplistic thresholds and suffer from threshold sensitivity, resulting in sub‑optimal performance. To address aforementioned issues, we propose VLM-OpenXpert, which comprises two training‑free, plug‑and‑play inference modules. SUFF performs SVD on high-confidence unknowns to extract a low-rank "unknown subspace". Each sample’s projection onto this subspace is weighted and softly removed from its feature, suppressing unknown components while preserving semantics. BGAT corrects score skewness via a Box–Cox transform, then fits a bimodal Gaussian mixture to adaptively estimate the optimal threshold balancing known-class recognition and unknown-class rejection. Experiments on 9 benchmarks and three backbones (CLIP, SigLIP, ALIGN) under source-free OSDA settings show that our training-free pipeline matches or outperforms retraining-heavy state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful lightweight inference calibration paradigm for open-set VLM deployment.

Beyond Retraining: Training-Free Unknown Class Filtering for Source-Free Open Set Domain Adaptation of Vision–Language Models

Social media has fundamentally transformed how people access information and form social connections, with content expression playing a critical role in driving information diffusion. While prior research has focused largely on network structures and tipping point identification, it provides limited tools for automatically generating content tailored for virality within a specific audience. To fill this gap, we propose the novel task of Diffusion-Oriented Content Generation (DOCG) and introduce an information enhancement algorithm for generating content optimized for diffusion. Our method includes an influence indicator that enables content-level diffusion assessment without requiring access to network topology, and an information editor that employs reinforcement learning to explore interpretable editing strategies. The editor leverages generative models to produce semantically faithful, audience-aware textual or visual content. Experiments on real-world social media datasets and user study demonstrate that our approach significantly improves diffusion effectiveness while preserving the core semantics of the original content.

Designed to Spread: A Generative Approach to Enhance Information Diffusion

Contextual priming, where earlier stimuli covertly bias later judgments, offers an unexplored attack surface for large language models (LLMs). We uncover a contextual priming vulnerability in which the previous response in the dialogue can steer its subsequent behavior toward policy-violating content. While existing jailbreak attacks largely rely on single-turn or multi-turn prompt manipulations, or inject static in-context examples, these methods suffer from limited effectiveness, inefficiency, or semantic drift. We introduce Response Attack (RA), a novel framework that strategically leverages intermediate, mildly harmful responses as contextual primers within a dialogue. By reformulating harmful queries and injecting these intermediate responses before issuing a targeted trigger prompt, RA exploits a previously overlooked vulnerability in LLMs. Extensive experiments across eight state-of-the-art LLMs show that RA consistently achieves significantly higher attack success rates than nine leading jailbreak baselines. Our results demonstrate that the success of RA is directly attributable to the strategic use of intermediate responses, which induce models to generate more explicit and relevant harmful content while maintaining stealth, efficiency, and fidelity to the original query.

Response Attack: Exploiting Contextual Priming to Jailbreak Large Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the quality of question answering by integrating external knowledge with internal knowledge. A robust RAG system needs to precisely regulate the dependence of the response on the two types of knowledge. The recently proposed context-aware contrastive decoding (CCD) method attempts to achieve this goal by adjusting the knowledge reference weights by comparing the output distribution differences of LLMS when they rely on different knowledge sources. However, these methods are based on probabilistic knowledge reference adjustment strategies (such as the highest probability or entropy), only focus on the relative confidence of the output responses at each decoding step, without considering the absolute confidence of the responses, which may lead to misjudgment of the external knowledge and internal knowledge reference degree in the decoding process. To this end, we propose a novel decoding method, Evidence-guided Contrastive Decoding (ECD), which conducts evidence modeling by constructing the Dirichlet distribution and regards logits as evidence vectors, so as to regulate the reference degree of internal and external knowledge more accurately, and finally improve the quality of generated responses. Extensive evaluations across four public benchmark datasets on three mainstream LLMs have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of ECD.

ECD: Evidence-guided Contrastive Decoding in Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Accurate Knowledge Reference Adjustment

Trajectory similarity retrieval is the cornerstone of spatiotemporal data mining and is dominated by a trade-off: traditional metrics are computationally expensive, while learning-based methods suffer from substantial training costs and potential instability. This paper challenges this dichotomy by proposing \textbf{Geo}metric \textbf{P}rototype \textbf{T}rajectory \textbf{H}ashing (GeoPTH), a novel, lightweight, and non-learning framework for efficient trajectory retrieval. GeoPTH constructs data-dependent hash functions by using representative trajectory prototypes, i.e., small point sets preserving geometric characteristics, as anchors. The hashing process is efficient, which involves mapping a new trajectory to its closest prototype via a robust, \textit{Hausdorff}-guided metric. Extensive experiments show that GeoPTH’s retrieval accuracy is highly competitive with both traditional metrics and state-of-the-art learning methods, and it significantly outperforms binary codes generated through simple binarization of the learned embeddings. Critically, GeoPTH consistently outperforms all competitors in terms of efficiency. Our work demonstrates that a lightweight, prototype-centric approach offers a practical and powerful alternative, achieving an exceptional balance between retrieval performance and computational efficiency.

GeoPTH: A Lightweight Approach to Category-Based Trajectory Retrieval via Geometric Prototype Trajectory Hashing

As Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) continue to gain traction in deep learning, Winograd convolution has emerged as a key algorithm to enhance computational efficiency. Although ARM-based CPUs are increasingly prevalent in mobile devices, embedded systems and HPC servers, existing 2D Winograd convolution implementations for ARM often leave room for improvement in transformation efficiency, computational throughput, and overall versatility. Furthermore, the lack of tailored 3D Winograd convolution implementations for ARM architectures stems from the additional complexity of supporting higher-dimensional kernels. AirWino introduces a set of novel optimizations covering transformations, data layouts, micro-kernel computations, and parallelization strategies for both 2D and 3D Winograd convolution. It supports FP32 and FP16 precisions with filter sizes of 3 and 5, targeting a broad range of applications. Evaluations on four distinct ARM platforms show that AirWino consistently outperforms state-of-the-art libraries across various experimental scenarios and hardware configurations, highlighting its efficiency and portability.

AirWino: Optimized Winograd Convolution for Accelerating CNN Inference on ARMv8 Processors

3D object detection is a critical component of autonomous driving, yet its performance degrades severely in adverse weather due to the degradation of LiDAR point clouds. While existing LiDAR-4D radar fusion methods enhance robustness by incorporating weather-robust 4D radar data, they often depend on well geometric structures from LiDAR and so struggle to effectively exploit radar data in case of degraded LiDAR data. To tackle this challenge, we propose REL, a novel 4D radar-guided LiDAR geometric enhancement framework. It utilizes 4D radar features to dynamically generate virtual LiDAR points, effectively increasing the density of degraded LiDAR data. Moreover, a Position-Guided Cross Attention (PGCA) module is proposed to enhance the feature representation of virtual points, while an Adaptive Feature Fusion (AFF) module is designed to integrate virtual and real LiDAR features. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar and Vod-Fog datasets demonstrate that REL achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection performance under diverse adverse weather conditions. Notably, REL improves the overall AP3D by 9.3% on K-Radar and boosts the cyclist class by up to 52.9% 3D mAP under the most severe foggy condition on Vod-Fog.

Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection in Adverse Weather by Leveraging 4D Radar for LiDAR Geometry Enhancement

Image composition aims to seamlessly insert foreground object into background. Despite the huge progress in generative image composition, the existing methods are still struggling with simultaneous detail preservation and foreground pose/view adjustment. To address this issue, we extend the existing generative composition model to multi-reference version, which allows using arbitrary number of foreground reference images. Furthermore, we propose to calibrate the global and local features of foreground reference images to make them compatible with the background information. The calibrated reference features can supplement the original reference features with useful global and local information of proper pose/view. Extensive experiments on MVImgNet and MureCom demonstrate that the generative model can greatly benefit from the calibrated reference features.

CareCom: Generative Image Composition with Calibrated Reference Features

Cross-time vehicle re-identification (Re-ID), especially across day and night conditions, remains a challenging problem due to drastic illumination variations that lead to significant domain shifts. While existing methods perform well under daytime scenarios, their effectiveness degrades severely in cross-domain settings, and fully supervised solutions demand costly annotations in both domains. In this paper, we introduce a new setting, Unsupervised Day-Night Vehicle Re-Identification (USL-DN-ReID), and propose a novel Cluster-Instance Alignment (CIA) framework to address it. CIA performs dual-level alignment: 1) at the cluster level, a Dictionary-Guided Graph Matching (DGM) module builds a cross-domain topological graph using soft similarities among cluster centers and solves global matching via the Hungarian algorithm; 2) at the instance level, a Multi-Factor Adaptive Alignment (MAA) module introduces a multi-factor adaptive weighting strategy that emphasizes high-confidence pairwise relations while suppressing noise. Together, these components enable robust and scalable cross-domain adaptation without requiring target-domain labels. Extensive experiments conducted on the DN-348 and DN-Wild benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed CIA framework, setting new state-of-the-art results on both datasets.

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