Singapore

Recent advancements in multi-robot navigation have explored methods that combine Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like scene understanding or high-level decision-making. However, these approaches face challenges with high inference latency and potential hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, GUIDER, that utilizes an LLM in two different offline roles. First, we leverage the LLM as an offline knowledge source. Its expertise is distilled into a compact model, which is applied only when the RL agent is uncertain about its own value estimates and the model itself is confident in its prediction. Additionally, we utilize the LLM as an offline semantic engine. This process translates the LLM&#39;s high-level understanding of situational risk into a dynamic adjustment of the RL agent&#39;s behavioral style, evolving a function that optimally balances conservative and aggressive actions. We conduct extensive experiments in both terrestrial and maritime settings. Across all maritime scenarios (3–12 robots), GUIDER improves the task success rate and reduces the collision rate significantly compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based multi-robot navigation methods.

AAAI 2026

Guided Distillation and Risk Adaptive Evolution for Multi-Robot Navigation

driving & flight. prs: planning under uncertainty

app: mobility

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.

Recent advancements in multi-robot navigation have explored methods that combine Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like scene understanding or high-level decision-making. However, these approaches face challenges with high inference latency and potential hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, GUIDER, that utilizes an LLM in two different offline roles. First, we leverage the LLM as an offline knowledge source. Its expertise is distilled into a compact model, which is applied only when the RL agent is uncertain about its own value estimates and the model itself is confident in its prediction. Additionally, we utilize the LLM as an offline semantic engine. This process translates the LLM's high-level understanding of situational risk into a dynamic adjustment of the RL agent's behavioral style, evolving a function that optimally balances conservative and aggressive actions. We conduct extensive experiments in both terrestrial and maritime settings. Across all maritime scenarios (3–12 robots), GUIDER improves the task success rate and reduces the collision rate significantly compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based multi-robot navigation methods.

technical paper

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.

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific knowledge from a pretrained model. Existing methods often rely on retained training data to preserve utility; such dependence is impractical due to privacy and scalability constraints. A further complication arises when unlearning is applied to vision-language models (VLMs), where entangled multimodal representations make targeted forgetting especially challenging.
We propose DIET, a principled **retain-data-free unlearning** method for VLMs that addresses these challenges by leveraging the geometry of hyperbolic space. The core idea is to push forget embeddings toward class-mismatched prototypes located at the boundary of the hyperbolic space. In hyperbolic geometry, points near the boundary become infinitely distant from interior points. As a result, moving forget embeddings to the boundary makes their influence on the model asymptotically negligible. To formalize this, we guide the forgetting process using the Busemann function, which quantifies directional distance to the boundary. We further develop an adaptive scheme based on optimal transport that selects mismatched prototypes for each forget embedding, enabling flexible unlearning dynamics.
Extensive experiments on fine-grained datasets such as Flowers102, OxfordPets, and StanfordCars show that DIET achieves an average forget accuracy of 8.06\%, while preserving 69.04\% utility using only 16 samples per concept, significantly outperforming the best retain-free baselines with a **117.5\%** in model utility, 
and showing competitive performance to retain-data baselines with only a **3.79\%** drop

DIET: Machine Unlearning on a Data-Diet

The primary goal of 3D point cloud completion is to reconstruct complete and high-resolution point clouds from incomplete and low-resolution inputs. While some recent approaches have achieved satisfactory completion performance by incorporating additional images, there remains room for improvement in fully exploiting and utilizing the rich geometric relation information contained in parts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network (SGPRNet) for Point Cloud Completion. Its core innovation lies in establishing part semantic relations to guide the reconstruction of structurally consistent local geometries. Specifically, we utilize Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) to automatically generate the specific text of 3D shape, which provides detailed geometric part relations descriptions. Building upon this, we design an Orthogonal Semantic Part Transfer (OSPT) module that learns transferable semantic relations between geometric parts. Subsequently, we develop a Semantic Geometric Relation-aware Transformer (SGRFormer) to progressively refine these semantic features, enhancing point cloud representation and guiding the generation of fine local structures. In addition, we establish a point-text pairs corpus, OmniObject3D-212/34 and Text-ViPC datasets based on existing OmniObject3D and ShapeNet-ViPC datasets, incorporating the specific text. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art completion methods.

Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion

Alignment plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLMs) in aligning with human preferences on a specific task/domain. Traditional alignment methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously learned values when adapting to new preferences or domains. We introduce LifeAlign, a novel framework for lifelong alignment that enables LLMs to maintain consistent human preference alignment across sequential learning tasks without forgetting previously learned values. Our approach consists of two key innovations. First, we propose a focalized preference optimization strategy that aligns LLMs with new preferences while preventing the erosion of alignment acquired from previous tasks. Second, we develop a short-to-long memory consolidation mechanism that merges denoised short-term preference representations into stable long-term memory using intrinsic dimensionality reduction, enabling efficient storage and retrieval of alignment patterns across diverse domains. We evaluate LifeAlign across multiple sequential alignment tasks spanning different domains and preference types. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in maintaining both preference alignment quality and knowledge retention compared to existing lifelong learning approaches.

LifeAlign: Lifelong Alignment for Large Language Models with Memory-Augmented Focalized Preference Optimization

Commercial-grade poster design demands the seamless integration of aesthetic appeal with precise, informative content delivery. Current automated poster generation systems face significant limitations, including incomplete design workflows, poor text rendering accuracy, and insufficient flexibility for commercial applications. To address these challenges, we propose PosterVerse, a full-workflow, commercial-grade poster generation method that seamlessly automates the entire design process while delivering high-density and scalable text rendering. PosterVerse replicates professional design through three key stages: (1) blueprint creation using fine-tuned LLMs to extract key design elements from user requirements, (2) graphical background generation via customized diffusion models to create visually appealing imagery, and (3) unified layout-text rendering with an MLLM-powered HTML engine to guarantee high text accuracy and flexible customization. In addition, we introduce PosterDNA, a commercial-grade, HTML-based dataset tailored for training and validating poster design models. To the best of our knowledge, PosterDNA is the first Chinese poster generation dataset to introduce HTML typography files, enabling scalable text rendering and fundamentally solving the challenges of rendering small and high-density text. Experimental results demonstrate that PosterVerse consistently produces commercial-grade posters with appealing visuals, accurate text alignment, and customizable layouts, making it a promising solution for automating commercial poster design. Dataset and code will be publicly available.

PosterVerse: A Full-Workflow Framework for Commercial-Grade Poster Generation with HTML-Based Scalable Typography

We study streaming data with categorical features where the universe of distinct categorical items is not known in advance and can even grow unboundedly over time.
Feature hashing is commonly used as a pre-processing step to map these categorical values into a feature space of fixed size before learning their embeddings \citep{coleman2023unified, desai2022random}. While these methods have been developed and evaluated for offline or batch settings, in this paper we consider online settings. 
We show that deterministic embeddings suffer from forgetting in online learning, leading to performance deterioration. 
To mitigate this issue, we propose a \textit{probabilistic hash embedding} (PHE) model that treats hash embeddings as stochastic and applies Bayesian online learning to learn incrementally from data. 
Based on the structure of PHE, we derive a scalable inference algorithm to learn model parameters and infer/update the posteriors of hash embeddings and other latent variables. 
Our algorithm (i) can handle an evolving vocabulary of categorical items, (ii) is adaptive to new items without forgetting old items, (iii) is implementable with a bounded set of parameters that does not grow with the number of distinct observed values on the stream, and (iv) is efficiently implementable both in the offline and the online streaming setting. 
Experiments in classification, sequence modeling, and recommendation systems in online learning setups demonstrate the superior performance of PHE while maintaining high memory efficiency (consumes as low as 2~4% memory of a one-hot embedding table).

Probabilistic Hash Embeddings for Online Learning of Categorical Features

The long-term progression of neurodegenerative diseases is commonly conceptualized as a spatiotemporal diffusion process that consists of a graph diffusion process across the structural brain connectome and a localized reaction process within brain regions. However, modeling this progression remains challenging due to 1) the scarcity of longitudinal data obtained through irregular and infrequent subject visits and 2) the complex interplay of pathological mechanisms across brain regions and disease stages, where traditional models assume fixed mechanisms throughout disease progression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel stage-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that explicitly models how different contributing mechanisms dominate at different disease stages through time-dependent expert weighting. This architecture is a key innovation designed to maximize the utility of small datasets and provide interpretable insights into disease etiology. Data-wise, we utilize an iterative dual optimization method to properly estimate the temporal position of individual observations, constructing a cohort-level progression trajectory from irregular snapshots. Model-wise, we enhance the spatial component with an inhomogeneous graph neural diffusion model (IGND) that allows diffusivity to vary based on node states and time, providing more flexible representations of brain networks. We also introduce a localized neural reaction module to capture complex dynamics beyond standard processes.The resulting IGND-MoE model dynamically integrates these components across temporal states, offering a principled way to understand how stage-specific pathological mechanisms contribute to progression. When used to model tau pathology propagation in human brains, IGND-MoE outperforms purely pathophysiological and purely neural baselines in long-term prediction accuracy. Moreover, its stage-wise weights yield novel clinical insights that align with literature, suggesting that graph-related processes are more influential at early stages, while other unknown physical processes become dominant later on. Our findings highlight the necessity of designing hybrid and expert-constrained models that account for the evolving nature of neurodegenerative processes.

A Stage-Aware Mixture of Experts Framework for Neurodegenerative Disease Progression Modelling

Recent self-supervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. 
However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. 
This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. 
To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. 
Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. 
A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. 
Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks. 
Our code and pretrained models shall be released upon the acceptance of this work.

S2-UniSeg: Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling for Scalable Segment Anything Without Supervision

State-of-the-art fact-checking systems combat misinformation at scale by employing autonomous LLM-based agents to decompose complex claims into smaller sub-claims, verify each sub-claim individually, and aggregate the partial results to produce verdicts with justifications (explanatory rationales for the verdicts).
The security of these systems is crucial, as compromised fact-checkers, which tend to be easily underexplored, can amplify misinformation.
This work introduces Fact2Fiction, the first poisoning attack framework targeting such agentic fact-checking systems.
Fact2Fiction mirrors the decomposition strategy and exploits system-generated justifications to craft tailored malicious evidences that compromise sub-claim verification.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fact2Fiction achieves 8.9\%--21.2\% higher attack success rates than state-of-the-art attacks across various poisoning budgets. Fact2Fiction exposes security weaknesses in current fact-checking systems and highlights the need for defensive countermeasures.

Fact2Fiction: Targeted Poisoning Attack to Agentic Fact-checking System

Quantum computing is finding promising applications in optimization, machine learning and physics, leading to the development of various models for representing quantum information classically.
Because these representations are often studied in different contexts (many-body physics, machine learning, formal verification, simulation), little is known about fundamental trade-offs between their succinctness and the runtime of operations to update them.
We therefore analytically investigate widely-used quantum state representations: matrix product states (MPS), several decision diagram (DD) variants, and restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs).
We map the relative succinctness of these data structures and provide the complexity for relevant query and manipulation operations. Further, we introduce ``rapidity'' for non-canonical representations: representation $A$ is at least as rapid as $B$, if it can polynomially simulate an operation performed on $B$ \emph{taking the size of $B$ as a unit}.
We then provide a framework for deriving rapidity relations for almost all operations in one stroke.
Our results show inter alia 
(1) that most DD variants are redundant with respect to MPS in the strongest asymptotic sense
(MPS is at least as rapid as those DD variants for almost all operations),
(2) that only one DD variant called LIMDD and RBM have succinctness incomparable to MPS, and
(3) that LIMDD and RBM seem to achieve this by sacrificing tractability of counting queries through a metatheorem on conditional hardness of these queries.

A Knowledge Compilation Map for Quantum Information

We train Transformer-based language models on ten foundational algorithmic tasks and observe pronounced phase transitions in their loss curves that deviate from established power-law scaling trends. Over large ranges of compute, the validation loss barely improves, then abruptly decreases. Probing the models’ internal representations reveals that quiet features are learned prior to any decrease in task loss. These quiet features represent intermediate algorithmic computations that do not by themselves improve the output loss. Ablation experiments demonstrate that individual quiet features are causally necessary for task performance. Our results demonstrate that substantial representational progress can remain hidden beneath an apparently flat loss curve, challenging the prevailing use of cross‑entropy as a proxy for learning and motivating richer diagnostics for monitoring model training.

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