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Machine learning based predictions are increasingly used in sensitive decision-making applications that directly affect our lives. This has led to extensive research into ensuring the fairness of classifiers. Beyond just fair classification, emerging legislation now mandates that when a classifier delivers a negative decision, it must also offer actionable steps an individual can take to reverse that outcome. This concept is known as _algorithmic recourse_. Nevertheless, many researchers have expressed concerns about the fairness guarantees within the recourse process itself. In this work, we provide a theoretical characterization of unfairness in algorithmic recourse, formally linking fairness guarantees in recourse and classification, and highlighting limitations of the standard equal cost paradigm. We then introduce a novel fairness framework based on _social burden_, along with a practical algorithm **MISOB**, broadly applicable under real-world conditions. Empirical results on real-world datasets show that **MISOB** reduces the social burden across all groups without compromising overall classifier accuracy.

AAAI 2026

Revisiting (Un)Fairness in Recourse by Minimizing Worst-Case Social Burden

and fairness

evaluation and analysis

explainable ml

interpretable

transparent

ethics

bias

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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.<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.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance in a broad spectrum of fields, but always suffer from the generalization problem when confronted with out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Information bottleneck (IB) principle, which endeavors to learn the minimally sufficient representations for downstream tasks, has been shown to be a promising strategy in dealing with this problem. However, the IB-based methods do not inherently distinguish between causal and non-causal parts in the graph, leading to underperforming OOD generalization ability. In this paper, we develop the Graph Causal Information Bottleneck (GCIB) framework, a causal extension of the IB for graph data, which is capable of jointly compressing abundant information and capturing causal dependency from the input graph. Specifically, we endow graph IB with the ability of maintaining causal control by incorporating the underlying causal structure and introducing intervention operation. On this basis, we formulate the learning objective for GCIB and present its specific implementation. Graph representations learned by GCIB can effectively preserve causal information that fundamentally determines graph properties, resulting in outstanding OOD generalization ability. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GCIB over state-of-the-art baselines.

GCIB: Causal Intervention Guided Graph Information Bottleneck Framework

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is pivotal for drug safety and clinical decision-making. Recently, subgraph-based methods utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs) and domain information have achieved promising results by extracting informative subgraphs for DDI prediction. However, existing subgraph extraction methods are typically coarse-grained and nonspecific, facing two key limitations: First, they are constrained by the vast and noisy nature of real-world KGs, making it challenging to identify the most informative substructures from the massive space of candidate subgraphs. Second, current methods often fail to exploit the molecular structural specificity of drugs to selectively extract relevant subgraphs, lacking effective integration of molecular structure information with knowledge graph context. To address these challenges, we propose RISE-DDI, a novel framework for Reinforced-based Informative Subgraph Extraction approach for drug-drug interaction prediction. Specifically, RISE-DDI formulates the subgraph extraction as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverages a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent to dynamically and adaptively extract the most informative and context-specific subgraphs for each drug pair. The agent is guided by a learnable structure-aware reward model that considers both the topological context from the knowledge graph and the molecular features of the drug pairs, thereby encouraging the selection of subgraphs that are both structurally relevant and biologically informative. Extensive experiments on DDI benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both transductive and inductive scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 20\%. Furthermore, visualization analyses of the extracted subgraphs highlight the interpretability of our model, providing insights into the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions.

Informative Subgraph Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Explanation fidelity, which measures how accurately an explanation reflects a model’s true reasoning, remains critically underexplored in recommender systems. We introduce SPINRec (Stochastic Path Integration for Neural Recommender Explanations), a model-agnostic explanation method that adapts path-integration techniques to the sparse and implicit nature of recommendation data. To address the limitations of prior approaches, SPINRecemploys a stochastic baseline sampling strategy. Instead of integrating from a fixed or unrealistic baseline, it samples multiple plausible user profiles from the empirical data distribution and selects the most faithful attribution path. This design accounts for the importance of both observed and unobserved interactions in modern recommenders, resulting in more stable, accurate, and personalized explanations. We conduct the most comprehensive fidelity evaluation to date in this domain. Our experiments span three models (MF, VAE, NCF), three datasets (ML1M, Yahoo! Music, Pinterest), and a suite of counterfactual metrics, including AUC-based perturbation curves and fixed-length diagnostics. SPINRec consistently outperforms strong baselines such as SHAP, LIME, FIA, and LXR across all evaluation settings. These results establish a new benchmark for faithful explainability in recommendation. Code and evaluation tools will be released publicly to support reproducibility and future research.

Fidelity-Aware Recommendation Explanations via Stochastic Path Integration

Weight Averaging (WA) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing generalization by promoting convergence to a flat loss landscape, which correlates with stronger out-of-distribution performance. However, applying WA directly to multi-modal domain generalization (MMDG) is challenging: differences in optimization speed across modalities lead WA to overfit to faster-converging ones in early stages, suppressing the contribution of slower yet complementary modalities, thereby hindering effective modality fusion and skewing the loss surface toward sharper, less generalizable minima.
To address this issue, we propose MBCD, a unified collaborative distillation framework that retains WA's flatness-inducing advantages while overcoming its shortcomings in multi-modal contexts. MBCD begins with adaptive modality dropout in the student model to curb early-stage bias toward dominant modalities. A gradient consistency constraint then aligns learning signals between uni-modal branches and the fused representation, encouraging coordinated and smoother optimization. Finally, a WA-based teacher conducts cross-modal distillation by transferring fused knowledge to each uni-modal branch, which strengthens cross-modal interactions and steer convergence toward flatter solutions. 
Extensive experiments on MMDG benchmarks show that MBCD consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and robustness across diverse unseen domains.

Modality-Balanced Collaborative Distillation for Multi-Modal Domain Generalization

The proliferation of high-quality text from Large Language Models (LLMs) demands reliable and efficient detection methods. While existing training-free approaches show promise, they often rely on surface-level statistics and overlook fundamental signal properties of the text generation process. In this work, we reframe detection as a signal processing problem, introducing a novel paradigm that analyzes the sequence of token log-probabilities in the frequency domain. By systematically analyzing the signal's spectral properties using the global Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and the local Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), we find that human-written text consistently exhibits significantly higher spectral energy. This higher energy reflects the larger-amplitude fluctuations inherent in human writing compared to the suppressed dynamics of LLM-generated text.
Based on this key insight, we construct SpecDetect, a detector built on a single, robust feature from the global DFT: DFT total energy. We also propose an enhanced version, SpecDetect++, which incorporates a sampling discrepancy mechanism to further boost robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art model while running in nearly half the time. Our work introduces a new, efficient, and interpretable pathway for LLM-generated text detection, showing that classical signal processing techniques offer a surprisingly powerful solution to this modern challenge. Our code is provided in the supplementary material.

SpecDetect: Simple, Fast, and Training-Free Detection of LLM-Generated Text via Spectral Analysis

Satellite-acquired optical remote sensing imagery is extensively applied in time-critical applications like traffic surveillance and evaluation of natural disasters. However, clouds, as a common atmospheric phenomenon, frequently obscure observation. 
Current approaches aim to restore visibility in cloud-obscured regions, yet they typically fall short in the presence of dense cloud cover, which are exceedingly prevalent in remote sensing imagery. Alternative approaches rely on the satellite revisit cycle, frequently surpassing ten days, a duration impractical for genuine application scenarios due to target changes and bandwidth limitations.
To address these issues, this paper proposes SCo-Cloud,
a novel satellite constellation collaboration framework for cloud-aware onboard-computed imaging and transmission, 
which consists of Center-Sat and Edge-Sats.
We propose onboard thin cloud removal and re-imaging region location models to locate the impact of clouds.
We further design a novel multi-satellite scheduling strategy to eliminate clouds.
The models above are integrated within the Center-Sat, with the nearby Edge-Sats collaborating in tandem to execute re-imaging assignments.
Furthermore, to facilitate in-depth research, we have meticulously developed a cloud-covered target detection dataset.
Comprehensive experiments have conclusively demonstrated that SCo-Cloud effectively surpasses the limitations inherent in current approaches, providing accurate and timely responses within the domain of Earth observation.

SCo-Cloud: Satellite Constellation Collaboration for Cloud-Aware Onboard-Computed Imaging and Transmission

Event co-occurrences have been proven effective for event argument extraction (EAE) in previous studies; 
however, few have considered intra- and inter-event role correlations. Since role varies among different event types, event structure heterogeneity and overlap pose significant challenges to EAE. To address this issue, we propose a Role Correlation Structure-Enhanced model for Multi-Event Argument Extraction (RoSE), capable of capturing both heterogeneity and overlap of event structures through modeling role correlations. The proposed RoSE model employs a joint context-prompts input, role-centric graph-guided encoder (RoGE), and role-specific information fusion (RoIF). The RoGE is designed to enhance the intra- and inter-event role correlation between prompts and their corresponding event contexts. The RoIF module utilizes intra-event role information to improve multi-event arguments extraction.
Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmarks (RAMS, WikiEvents, MLEE, and ACE05) demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of incorporating both intra- and inter-event role correlations.
Our code is available here.

RoSE: A Role Correlation Structure-Enhanced Model for Multi-Event Argument Extraction

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding and generation by integrating visual and textual data. However, these models frequently exhibit object hallucination problems: generating outputs that are inconsistent with the input image. Existing improved methods for mitigating hallucinations still suffer from two key limitations: dynamic approaches based on logits or attention mechanisms risk suppressing valuable linguistic priors, whereas static methods that employ fixed intervention vectors lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse images and questions. To address these issues, we propose RFI (Rectified Flow Intervention), a novel approach that harnesses the linear trajectory design of rectified flow for input-specific adaptation and employs gradient correction to ensure coherent generation, effectively combining the adaptability of dynamic methods with the stability of static ones. RFI dynamically predicts latent-space intervention vectors while requiring only a single forward pass in LVLMs per question, achieving computational efficiency (1.09x latency overhead for 100 new tokens). Extensive experiments show RFI significantly reduces hallucinations, achieving superior performance compared to existing advanced methods, highlighting its effectiveness as a lightweight plug-and-play method for reducing LVLM's hallucination in practical applications. The code will be available at https://github.com/purepasser-by/RFI.

RFI: Rectified Flow Intervention for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Data poisoning is a training-time attack that undermines the trustworthiness of learned models. In a targeted data poisoning attack, an adversary manipulates the training dataset to alter the classification of a targeted test point. Given the typically large size of training dataset, manual detection of poisoning is difficult. An alternative is to automatically measure a dataset's robustness against such an attack, which is the focus of this paper. We consider a threat model wherein an adversary can only perturb the labels of the training dataset, with knowledge limited to the hypothesis space of the victim's model. In this setting, we prove that finding the robustness is an NP-Complete problem, even when hypotheses are linear classifiers. To overcome this, we present a technique that finds lower and upper bounds of robustness. Our implementation of the technique computes these bounds efficiently in practice for many publicly available datasets. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, a poisoning exceeding the identified robustness bounds significantly impacts test point classification. We are also able to compute these bounds in many more cases where state-of-the-art techniques fail.

On Robustness of Linear Classifiers to Targeted Data Poisoning

While large language model (LLM)-based user profiling of- fers significant potential for personalization, most existing approaches rely on empirical heuristics and lack grounding in the psychological mechanism that drive human behavior. In this paper, we introduce TRIPLE (Theory-guided Rea- soning for Intent and habIt Profiling with LLMs for pEr- sonalization), a novel framework that systematically inte- grates dual-process theory from social psychology into LLM- based user modeling. TRIPLE (1) constructs a habitual be- havior profile by identifying repeated patterns over time to model automatic responses; (2) builds an intentional behav- ior profile by inferring user attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB); and (3) generates behavioral rationale that reveal the interaction between habitual and intentional pro- cesses to predict user behavior in context-specific situations. We evaluate TRIPLE on five personalization tasks from the LaMP benchmark using multiple open-source LLMs. Re- sults show that TRIPLE consistently outperforms existing in- context learning methods, with especially pronounced gains on complex generative tasks such as headline and title gen- eration.Qualitative analyses further demonstrate that the pro- files and reasoning paths generated by TRIPLE provide inter- pretable and psychologically grounded explanations of user behavior. These findings provide strong evidence that incor- porating validated behavioral theories into LLM-based per- sonalization enhances both predictive performance and inter- pretability, paving a way for theory-driven, socio-cognitively informed user modeling.

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