Singapore

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have shown promise in enhancing spatial reasoning and task planning through learned semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges characteristic of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied in the literature.

In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination of locomotion and manipulation across challenging terrains. We further present the first comprehensive benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system’s generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks.

AAAI 2026

ODYSSEY: Open-World Quadrupeds Exploration and Manipulation for Long-Horizon Tasks

rob: embodied ai，rob: manipulation，ml: reinforcement learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

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-25 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.



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.

The Knowledge of Optimization And Learning Algorithms (KOALA) group studies how to integrate optimization, machine learning, and generative modeling to enable data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. We study decision-focused learning, embedding optimization as a differentiable layer to train models end-to-end for decision quality. We design scalable reinforcement learning algorithms for population and personalized healthcare, and develop efficient bilevel optimization methods for nested and multi-agent decision-making. These directions form a unified framework linking optimization and learning for impactful AI in healthcare. Through collaborations with hospitals and NGOs, our group designs and deploys algorithms for pediatric, diabetes, maternal, and mental health applications. Looking ahead, we aim to unite these foundations with generative AI to build theoretically grounded and socially responsible algorithms that advance trustworthy, real-world AI for health and beyond.

KOALA: Knowledge of Optimization and Learning Algorithms for Healthcare

The automatic detection of gaze targets in autistic children through artificial intelligence can be impactful, especially for those who lack access to a sufficient number of professionals to improve their quality of life. 
This paper introduces a new, real-world AI application for gaze target detection in autistic children, which predicts a child's point of gaze from an activity image. This task is foundational for building automated systems that can measure joint attention—a core challenge in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To facilitate the study of this challenging application, we collected the first-ever Autism Gaze Target (AGT) Dataset. We further propose a novel social-aware coarse-to-fine (SACF) gaze detection framework that explicitly leverages the social context of a scene to overcome the class imbalance common in autism datasets—a consequence of autistic children's tendency to show reduced gaze to faces. 
It utilizes a two-pathway architecture with expert models specialized in social and non-social gaze, guided by a context-awareness gate module. The results of our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance for gaze target detection in this population, significantly outperforming existing methods, especially on the critical minority class of face-directed gaze.

Toward Gaze Target Detection of Young Autistic Children

As a retina-inspired sensor with ultra-high temporal resolution, spike cameras can continuously capture dynamic scenes with high-speed motion. It is a key task to restore clear images from spike streams. The quantization effects in spike readout bring degradation to the visual quality of restored images. To tackle the degradation without introducing motion blur, existing methods often employ a short-term temporal window to infer the light intensity at a certain time point. However, these methods only focus on the spike signals within the current window, which limits their performance. Motivated by the human-like memory mechanism for visual signals from the retina, we explore Spike Stream Memory Transfer (SSMT) to restore the dynamic scenes, considering spike signals beyond the window. Specifically, we design a framework that leverages temporal memory by transferring previously inferred light intensity and motion to enhance current reconstruction. The framework enables a long-term temporal perception of spike streams to handle the spike quantization effects. Besides, we utilize the estimated motion to suppress the potential blur from inter-stream clips, considering the underlying motion of spike streams. We also develop a spike interval-guided alignment module to tackle the blur from intra-stream clips. Experiments on both synthetic and real-captured data show that our method can restore high-quality images from spike streams. The source code will be publicly available.

Spike Stream Memory Transfer for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Learning from multiple data streams in real-world scenarios is fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic heterogeneity and unpredictable concept drifts. Existing methods typically assume homogeneous streams and employ static architectures with indiscriminate knowledge fusion, limiting generalizability in dynamic hybrid environments. To tackle this gap, we propose CAMEL, a dynamic Collaborative Assistance Mixture of Experts Learning framework. CAMEL addresses heterogeneity by assigning each stream an independent system with a dedicated feature extractor and task-specific head. Meanwhile, a dynamic pool of specialized private experts captures stream-specific idiosyncratic patterns. Crucially, collaboration across these heterogeneous streams is enabled by a dedicated assistance expert. This expert employs a multi-head attention mechanism to distill and integrate relevant context autonomously from all other concurrent streams. It facilitates targeted knowledge transfer while inherently mitigating negative transfer from irrelevant sources. Furthermore, we propose an Autonomous Expert Tuner (AET) strategy, which dynamically manages expert lifecycles in response to drift. It instantiates new experts for emerging concepts (freezing prior ones to prevent catastrophic forgetting) and prunes obsolete ones. This expert-level plasticity provides a robust and efficient mechanism for online model capacity adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate CAMEL's superior generalizability across diverse hybrid multistreams and exceptional resilience against complex concept drifts.

Drift-aware Collaborative Assistance Mixture of Experts for Heterogeneous Multistream Learning

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (AVLN) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agents to localize targets in complex urban environments using linguistic instructions. While successful navigation demands both global environmental reasoning and fine-grained scene comprehension, existing UAV agents typically rely on single-step planning paradigms that struggle to balance these two aspects. To address this limitation, this work proposes a History-Enhanced Two-Stage Transformer (HETT) framework, which navigates in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, HETT first predicts coarse-grained target positions using spatial landmarks and historical context, then refines actions through fine-grained visual analysis. Moreover, a historical grid map is designed to dynamically aggregate and organize visual features into a structured spatial memory, enhancing comprehensive scene awareness. Additionally, the CityNav dataset annotations are manually refined to enhance data quality. Experimental results demonstrate that HETT achieves state-of-the-art Success Rate (SR) on our refined CityNav dataset. The refined dataset and code will be released.

History-Enhanced Two-Stage Transformer for Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation

This paper investigates the problems large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks, compressed sensing, and so on. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are commonly employed to solve such problems. However, existing algorithms often rely on vanishing step sizes, strong convexity assumptions, or entail substantial computational overhead to ensure convergence or obtain favorable complexity. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, we integrate consensus optimization and operator splitting techniques (see Problem Reformulation) to develop a novel stochastic splitting algorithm, termed the stochastic distributed regularized splitting method (S-D-RSM). In practice, S-D-RSM performs parallel updates of proximal mappings and gradient information for only a randomly selected subset of agents at each iteration. By introducing regularization terms, it effectively mitigates consensus discrepancies among distributed nodes. In contrast to conventional stochastic methods, our theoretical analysis establishes that S-D-RSM achieves global convergence without requiring diminishing step sizes or strong convexity assumptions. Furthermore, it achieves an iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon)$ with respect to both the objective function value and the consensus error. Numerical experiments show that S-D-RSM achieves up to 2--3$\times$ speedup compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while maintaining comparable or better accuracy. These results not only validate the algorithm’s theoretical guarantees but also demonstrate its effectiveness in practical tasks such as compressed sensing and empirical risk minimization. The code will be released after the anonymity period.

S-D-RSM: Stochastic Distributed Regularized Splitting Method for Large-Scale Convex Optimization Problems

Predicting the tensor properties of crystalline materials is a fundamental task in materials science. Unlike single-value property prediction, which is inherently invariant, tensor property prediction requires maintaining O(3) group tensor equivariance. Such equivariance constraint often requires specialized architecture designs to achieve effective predictions, inevitably introducing tremendous computational costs. Canonicalization, a classical technique for geometry, has recently been explored for efficient learning with symmetry. In this work, we revisit the problem of crystal tensor property prediction through the lens of canonicalization. Specifically, we demonstrate how polar decomposition, a simple yet efficient algebraic method, can serve as a form of canonicalization and be leveraged to ensure equivariant tensor property prediction. Building upon this insight, we propose a general O(3)-equivariant framework for efficient crystal tensor property prediction, referred to as GoeCTP. By utilizing canonicalization, GoeCTP achieves high efficiency without requiring the explicit incorporation of equivariance constraints into the network architecture. Experimental results indicate that GoeCTP achieves the best prediction performance and runs at most 13 times faster compared to existing state-of-the-art methods in benchmarking datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.

Revisiting the Canonicalization for Fast and Accurate Crystal Tensor Property Prediction

Tasks that require character-level reasoning, such as counting or locating characters within words, remain challenging for contemporary language models. A common conjecture is that language models' reliance on subword units, rather than characters, contributes to their struggles with character-level tasks, yet recent studies offer conflicting conclusions about the role of tokenization, leaving its impact unclear. To address this gap, we introduce CharBench, a comprehensive benchmark of character-level tasks that is two orders of magnitude larger than existing alternatives.
We evaluate a diverse range of leading open-weight and proprietary models on CharBench and find that it presents a significant challenge to modern LLMs, with an average accuracy of 43.6% and 32.3% on some tasks.
We present an in-depth analysis of how intrinsic properties of words and their segmentations into tokens correspond to model performance. For counting tasks, we find that tokenization properties are weakly correlated with correctness, while the length of the queried word and the actual character count play a more significant part. In contrast, for tasks requiring intra-word positional understanding, performance is negatively correlated with the length of the token containing the queried character, suggesting that longer tokens obscure character position information for LLMs. We encourage future work to build on the benchmark and evaluation methodology introduced here as tools for improving model performance on such tasks.

CharBench: Evaluating the Role of Tokenization in Character-Level Tasks

Uniform-reward reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which trains a single reward model to represent the preferences of all annotators, fails to capture the diversity of opinions across sub-populations, inadvertently favoring dominant groups. The state-of-the-art, MaxMin-RLHF, addresses this by learning group-specific reward models, and by optimizing for the group receiving the minimum reward, thereby promoting fairness. However, we identify that a key limitation of MaxMin-RLHF is its poor performance when the minimum-reward group is a *minority*. To mitigate this drawback, we introduce a novel framework, termed *SharedRep-RLHF*. At its core, SharedRep-RLHF learns and leverages *shared traits* in annotations among various groups, in contrast to learning separate reward models across groups. We first show that MaxMin-RLHF is provably suboptimal in learning shared traits, and then quantify the sample complexity of SharedRep RLHF. Experiments across diverse natural language tasks showcase the effectiveness of ShareRep-RLHF compared to MaxMin-RLHF with a gain of up to 20% in win rate.

SharedRep-RLHF: A Shared Representation Approach to RLHF with Diverse Preferences

IT environments typically have logging mechanisms to monitor system health and detect issues. However, the huge volume of generated logs makes manual inspection impractical, highlighting the importance of automated log analysis in IT Software Support. In this paper, we propose a log analytics tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for log data processing and issue diagnosis, enabling the generation of automated insights and summaries. We further present a novel approach for efficiently running LLMs on CPUs to process massive log volumes in minimal time without compromising output quality. We share the insights and lessons learned from deployment of the tool - in production since March 2024 - scaled across 70 software products, processing over 2000 tickets for issue diagnosis, achieving a time savings of 300+ man hours and an estimated $15,444 per month in manpower costs compared to the traditional log analysis practices.

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