Singapore

Large language models (LLMs) concentrate substantial knowledge in specialized domains due to extensive pretraining and instruction tuning, and they are now central to commercial and scientific practice. Yet access is usually limited to costly, rate limited interfaces, which motivates methods that can extract targeted domain knowledge with minimal querying effort. A further challenge is that the target domain may be unknown in advance, so naive or generic prompts waste queries and fail to expose the underlying concepts and relations that structure the domain.
In this work, we introduce a query efficient approach for domain specific knowledge stealing from black box language models. Rather than issuing random questions or generic templates, our framework performs self directed exploration that lets the model find the direction and mine domain knowledge by itself. Starting from a small and diverse seed, it discovers salient domain entities and induces their relations through structured question families that elicit definitional, functional, and compositional information. A feedback driven controller analyzes the errors and uncertainty of the extracted student model and uses this signal to refine subsequent queries, all without any prior domain knowledge or external resources.
We evaluate the method in two expert centric settings, medicine and finance, and observe consistently better performance while requiring significantly fewer queries.

AAAI 2026

Query-Efficient Domain Knowledge Stealing Against Large Language Models

nlp: (large) language models nlp: safety and robustness ml: active learning

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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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.

Unsupervised video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) is promising as it enables object-level scene representation and dynamics modeling as we humans do.
Mainstream video OCL methods adopt a recurrent architecture: An aggregator aggregates current video frame into object features, termed slots, under some queries; A transitioner transits current slots to queries for the next frame.
This is an effective architecture but all existing implementations both (\textit{i1}) neglect to incorporate next frame features, the most informative source for query prediction, and (\textit{i2}) fail to learn transition dynamics, the knowledge essential for query prediction.
To address these issues, we propose Random Slot-Feature pair for learning Query prediction (RandSF.Q): (\textit{t1}) We design a new transitioner to incorporate both slots and features, which provides more information for query prediction; (\textit{t2}) We train the transitioner to predict queries from slot-feature pairs randomly sampled from available recurrences, which drives it to learn transition dynamics.
Experiments on scene representation demonstrate that our method surpass existing video OCL methods significantly, e.g., up to 10 points on object discovery, setting new state-of-the-art. Such superiority also benefits downstream tasks like dynamics modeling.
Our core source code and training logs are available as the supplement.

Predicting Video Slot Attention Queries from Random Slot-Feature Pairs

Neural Differential Equations (NDEs) excel at modeling continuous-time dynamics, effectively handling challenges such as irregular observations, missing values, and noise. Despite their advantages, NDEs face a fundamental challenge in adopting dropout, a cornerstone of deep learning regularization, making them susceptible to overfitting. To address this research gap, we introduce Continuum Dropout, a universally applicable regularization technique for NDEs built upon the theory of alternating renewal processes. Continuum Dropout formulates the on-off mechanism of dropout as a stochastic process that alternates between active (evolution) and inactive (paused) states in continuous time. This provides a principled approach to prevent overfitting and enhance the generalization capabilities of NDEs. Moreover, Continuum Dropout offers a structured framework to quantify predictive uncertainty via Monte Carlo sampling at test time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Continuum Dropout outperforms existing regularization methods for NDEs, achieving superior performance on various time series and image classification tasks. It also yields better-calibrated and more trustworthy probability estimates, highlighting its effectiveness for uncertainty-aware modeling.

Continuum Dropout for Neural Differential Equations

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training across decentralized data, but faces key challenges of bidirectional communication overhead and client-side data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose pFed1BS, a novel personalized federated learning framework that achieves extreme communication compression through one-bit random sketching. Specifically, clients transmit highly compressed one-bit sketches of local model parameters, while the server aggregates these sketches into a global one-bit consensus vector and broadcasts it to all clients. For data heterogeneity, we introduce a sign-based regularizer into the objective function, guiding the optimization of personalized models that simultaneously align with the global consensus and preserve local data characteristics. To mitigate the computational burden of random sketching, we employ the Fast Hadamard Transform as an efficient projection mechanism, achieving near-linear computational complexity concerning the model dimension. Theoretical analysis guarantees that our algorithm converges to a stationary neighborhood of the global potential function. Numerical simulations demonstrate that pFed1BS substantially reduces communication costs while achieving competitive performance compared to advanced one-bit FL algorithms.

Personalized Federated Learning with Bidirectional Communication Compression via One-Bit Random Sketching

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) focuses on improving visual quality from various underwater scenes. Existing methods simplistically treat various degradations as homogeneous, disregarding their intrinsic connections and causing models to blindly learn, resulting in conflicting optimization goals and visual distortions. To address above limitations, we propose a Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception (CPLDP) model, which employs conditional prompt as degradation perception priors and guides underwater image enhancement. Specifically, we show that the natural language prompts not only promote distinguishing different degraded images, but also aid in exploring more details with semantic information. Therefore, the proposed method generates five key degradation prompts (green/blue/green-blue color casts, uneven illumination and blurriness) with conditional prompt learning. Subsequently, considering the intrinsic relationships among different degradations, we employ degradation perceptions as priors and fine-tune the learning strategy to enhance underwater images. During training, an adaptive loss function with multi-degradations is designed, allowing it to effectively handle the task conflicts among multiple underwater degradations. Additionally, we conduct a human visual-based underwater dataset with various degradation types by subjective statistics. Extensive experiments on both full-reference and no-reference datasets demonstrate that our CPLDP can achieve better visual results and outperform state-of-the-art UIE methods across various degradation scenarios.

Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception for Underwater Image Enhancement

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning in structured domains like mathematics and programming, its application to general-domain reasoning tasks remains challenging due to the absence of verifiable reward signals. To this end, methods like Reinforcement Learning with Reference Probability Reward (RLPR) have emerged, leveraging the probability of generating the final answer as a reward signal. However, these outcome-focused approaches neglect crucial step-by-step supervision of the reasoning process itself. To address this gap, we introduce Probabilistic Process Supervision (P2S), a novel self-supervision framework that provides fine-grained process rewards without requiring a separate reward model or human-annotated reasoning steps. During reinforcement learning, P2S synthesizes and filters high-quality reference reasoning chain (gold-CoT). The core of our method is to calculate a Path Faithfulness Reward (PFR) for each reasoning step, which is derived from the conditional probability of generating the gold-CoT's suffix, given the model's current reasoning prefix. Crucially, this PFR can be flexibly integrated with any outcome-based reward, directly tackling the reward sparsity problem by providing dense guidance. Extensive experiments on reading comprehension and medical Question Answering benchmarks show that P2S significantly outperforms strong baselines.

P2S: Probabilistic Process Supervision for General-Domain Reasoning Question Answering

Given the remarkable performance of diffusion models in image generation, recent research has been exploring their adaptation to style transfer. However, current diffusion-based approaches encounter persistent challenges, such as style distortions and the reliance on textual prompts for content preservation. To address these limitations, we introduce StyleFM, a novel training-free diffusion-based style transfer approach that incorporates optimization strategies into both the frequency and temporal domains. The proposed method provides two core innovations: (1) Tripartite Frequency Manipulation: To more precisely tailor frequency manipulation, StyleFM introduces a tripartite frequency design with a buffer band accounting for the overlap of content and style representations. In addition, StyleFM designs a frequency superposition editing method to achieve frequency enhancement. (2) Recursive Attention: StyleFM proposes the recursive attention strategy within the diffusion process, which facilitates the progressive and consistent injection of style information throughout the temporal process without reliance on text guidance. Experiments demonstrate that StyleFM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. It effectively preserves content fidelity while achieving sufficient style embedding.

StyleFM: Frequency Manipulation Empowered by Recursive Attention on Diffusion Models for Arbitrary Style Transfer

The homogeneity and heterogeneity across modalities are critical factors that influence multimodal fusion. In Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), the inherent textual information within the audio modality induces cross-modality homogeneity with the text modality. Conversely, the mutual independence between text and vision modalities results in their cross-modal heterogeneity. Although existing disentangle-based methods achieve notable performance gains by separating modality features into distinct subspaces, they overlook the characteristics of cross-modality heterogeneity and homogeneity among different modalities. To this end, we propose a novel Modality-aware Disentangle and Fusion (MDF) framework to investigate the role of core modality features. Specifically, we first use text as the anchor to disentangle the audio modality and extract its unique modality-specific features, thereby establishing cross-modal heterogeneity among text, audio, and vision. We then introduce a Cross-Modality Heterogeneity Enhancement (CHE) module to refine these features, further reinforcing their heterogeneous characteristics. Finally, a Modality Adaptive Weighting (MAW) module is employed to dynamically assign weights to the text, sound, and vision modalities based on their potential contributions to sentiment prediction, achieving a more effective multimodal representation for MSA. Experimental evaluations on different benchmarks demonstrate MDF's superiority, with extensive ablation studies confirming its effectiveness.

MDF: A Modality-Aware Disentanglement and Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Knowledge Tracing (KT) diagnoses students’ concept mas- tery through continuous learning state monitoring in education. Existing methods primarily focus on studying behavioral sequences based on ID or textual information. While existing methods rely on ID-based sequences or shallow textual features, they often fail to capture (1) the hierarchical evolution of cognitive states and (2) individualized prob- lem difficulty perception due to limited semantic modeling. Therefore, this paper proposes a Large Language Model Hyperbolic Aligned Knowledge Tracing(L-HAKT). First, the teacher agent deeply parses question semantics and explicitly constructs hierarchical dependencies of knowledge points; the student agent simulates learning behaviors to generate synthetic data. Then, contrastive learning is performed between synthetic and real data in hyperbolic space to reduce distribution differences in key features such as question difficulty and forgetting patterns. Finally, by optimizing hyperbolic curvature, we explicitly model the tree-like hierarchical structure of knowledge points, precisely characterizing differences in learning curve morphology for knowledge points at different levels. Extensive experiments on four real-world educational datasets validate the effectiveness of our Large Language Model Hyperbolic Aligned Knowledge Tracing (L-HAKT) framework.

Towards LLM-Empowered Knowledge Tracing via LLM-Student Hierarchical Behavior Alignment in Hyperbolic Space

Robust multi-label learning under noisy supervision remains a persistent challenge, where corrupted, incomplete, or ambiguous labels undermine the reliability of semantic learning. Existing approaches often address label noise through heuristic correction or local consistency constraints, but lack a unified mechanism to validate and refine supervision across structural and semantic levels. Inspired by cognitive theories of human memory, we propose CogniTrust, a novel framework that unifies verifiable supervision with a triadic memory model: episodic memory, semantic memory, and reconstructive memory. Episodic memory factorizes feature activations into spatially disentangled patterns to assess structural support and assign interpretable trust scores to labels. Building on this, semantic memory maintains class-level prototypes from structurally attentive regions to estimate semantic plausibility via prototype alignment. Moreover, reconstructive memory simulates generative supervision by interpolating between images through a diffusion-based mixup process, enriching training signals for ambiguous or borderline cases. Together, these components form a closed-loop mechanism that validates, calibrates, and synthesizes supervision from both spatial and semantic perspectives. Extensive experiments on noisy hashing benchmarks demonstrate that CogniTrust consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and provides interpretable justifications for label decisions. This work establishes a cognitively grounded paradigm for denoising through structurally verifiable supervision.

CogniTrust: Cognitive Memory-Driven Verifiable Supervision for Robust Hashing

Training-free video object editing aims to achieve precise object-level manipulation, including object insertion, swapping, and deletion. However, it faces significant challenges in maintaining fidelity and temporal consistency. Existing methods, often designed for U-Net architectures, suffer from two primary limitations: inaccurate inversion due to first-order solvers, and contextual conflicts caused by crude "hard" feature replacement. These issues are more challenging in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), where the unsuitability of prior layer-selection heuristics makes effective guidance challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a novel training-free framework for DiT-based video object editing. In detail, we first employ a high-order Rectified Flow solver to establish a robust editing foundation. The core of our framework is Adaptive Context Enrichment (for specifying what to edit), a mechanism that addresses contextual conflicts. Instead of replacing features, it enriches the self-attention context by concatenating Key-Value pairs from parallel reconstruction and editing paths, empowering the model to dynamically fuse information. Additionally, to determine where to apply this enrichment (for specifying where to edit), we propose a systematic, data-driven analysis to identify task-specific vital layers. Based on a novel Guidance Responsiveness Metric, our method pinpoints the most influential DiT blocks for different tasks (e.g., insertion, swapping), enabling targeted and highly effective guidance. Extensive experiments show that ContextFlow significantly outperforms existing training-free methods and even surpasses several state-of-the-art training-based approaches, delivering temporally coherent, high-fidelity results.

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