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Counterexample-Guided Abstraction Refinement (CEGAR) is a prominent technique to generate Cartesian abstractions for guiding search in cost- optimal planning. The core idea is to iteratively refine the abstraction, finding a flaw of the current optimal abstract plan. All existing approaches find these flaws by executing the abstract plan using progression in the original state space.

Instead, we propose to do backward refinements by using regression from the goals. This results in a new type of flaw, that can identify invalid plan suffixes. The resulting abstractions are less focused on the initial state, but more informative on average, significantly improving the performance of current CEGAR-based techniques. Furthermore, they can be combined with forward refinements in several bidirectional strategies that provide the benefits of both methods.

AAAI 2024

When CEGAR Meets Regression: A Love Story in Optimal Classical Planning

optimal

heuristic search

automated planning

classical planning

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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AAAI 2026

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.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

We present a new boundary sensitive framework for polyp segmentation, termed Polyper.Our method is motivated by a clinical approach that seasoned medical practitioners often leverage the inherent features of interior polyp regions to tackle blurred boundaries.Inspired by this, we propose to explicitly leverages boundary regions to bolster the model's boundary discrimination capability while minimizing computational resource wastage. Our approach first extracts low-confidence boundary regions and high-confidence prediction regions from an initial segmentation map through differentiable morphological operators.Then, we design the boundary sensitive attention that concentrates on augmenting the features near the boundary regions using the high-confidence prediction region's characteristics to generate good segmentation results.Our proposed method can be seamlessly integrated with classical encoder networks, like ResNet-50, MiT-B1, and Swin Transformer.To evaludate the effectiveness of Polyper, we conduct experiments on five publicly available challenging datasets, and receive state-of-the-art performance on all of them. Code is available at https://github.com/haoshao-nku/medical_seg.git.

Polyper: Boundary Sensitive Polyp Segmentation

Long sequence prediction has broad and significant application value in fields such as finance, wind power, and weather. However, the complex long-term dependencies of long sequence data and the potential domain shift problems limit the effectiveness of traditional models in practical scenarios. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference Framework (AMPIF) based on sequence decomposition, which can effectively enhance the long sequence prediction ability of various basic models. Specifically, first, we decouple complex sequences into seasonal and trend components through a frequency domain decomposition module. Then, we design an adaptive meta-learning task construction strategy, which divides the seasonal and trend components into different tasks through a clustering-matching approach. Finally, we design a dual-stream amortized network (ST-DAN) to capture shared information between seasonal-trend tasks and use the support set to generate task-specific parameters for rapid generalization learning on the query set. We conducted extensive experiments on six datasets, including wind power and finance scenarios, and the results show that our method significantly outperforms baseline methods in prediction accuracy, interpretability, and algorithm stability and can effectively enhance the long sequence prediction capabilities of base models. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zhu-JP/AMPIF.

Adaptive Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference Framework for Long Sequence Prediction | VIDEO

Soft robot design is an intricate field with unique challenges due to its complex and vast search space. In the past literature, evolutionary computation algorithms, including novel probabilistic generative models (PGMs), have shown potential in this realm. However, these methods are sample inefficient and predominantly focus on rigid robots in locomotion tasks, which limit their performance and application in robot design automation. In this work, we propose MorphVAE, an innovative PGM that incorporates a multi-task training scheme and a meticulously crafted sampling technique termed ``continuous natural selection'', aimed at bolstering sample efficiency. This method empowers us to gain insights from assessed samples across diverse tasks and temporal evolutionary stages, while simultaneously maintaining a delicate balance between optimization efficiency and biodiversity. Through extensive experiments in various locomotion and manipulation tasks, we substantiate the efficiency of MorphVAE in generating high-performing and diverse designs, surpassing the performance of competitive baselines.

MorphVAE: Advancing Morphological Design of Voxel-Based Soft Robots with Variational Autoencoders | VIDEO

Automated Chinese ancient character restoration (ACACR) remains a challenging task due to its historical significance and aesthetic complexity. Existing methods are constrained by non-professional masks and even overfitting when training on small-scale datasets, which hinder their interdisciplinary application to traditional fields. In this paper, we are proud to introduce the Chinese Ancient Rubbing and Manuscript Character Dataset (ARMCD), which consists of 15,553 real-world ancient single-character images with 42 rubbings and manuscripts, covering the works of over 200 calligraphy artists spanning from 200 to 1,800 AD. We are also dedicated to providing professional synthetic masks by extracting localized erosion from real eroded images. Moreover, we propose DiffACR (Diffusion model for automated Chinese Ancient Character Restoration), a diffusion-based method for the ACACR task. Specifically, we regard the synthesis of eroded images as a special form of cold diffusion on uneroded ones and extract the prior mask directly from the eroded images. Our experiments demonstrate that our method comprehensively outperforms most existing methods on the proposed ARMCD. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lhl322001/DiffACR.

Towards Automated Chinese Ancient Character Restoration: A Diffusion-Based Method with a New Dataset

Despite the remarkable success of graph neural networks (GNNs) in modeling graph-structured data, like other machine learning models, GNNs are also susceptible to making biased predictions based on sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. For fairness consideration, recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods propose to filter out sensitive information from inputs or representations, e.g., edge dropping or feature masking. However, we argue that such filtering-based strategies may also filter out some non-sensitive feature information, leading to a sub-optimal trade-off between predictive performance and fairness. To address this issue, we unveil an innovative neutralization-based paradigm, where additional Fairness-facilitating Features (F3) are incorporated into node features or representations before message passing. The F3 are expected to statistically neutralize the sensitive bias in node representations and provide additional nonsensitive information. We also provide theoretical explanations for our rationale, concluding that F3 can be realized by emphasizing the features of each node’s heterogeneous neighbors (neighbors with different sensitive attributes). We name our method as FairSIN, and present three implementation variants from both data-centric and model-centric perspectives. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets with three different GNN backbones show that FairSIN significantly improves fairness metrics while maintaining high prediction accuracies.

FairSIN: Achieving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks through Sensitive Information Neutralization

Language conditioned 3D object grounding aims to find the object within the 3D scene mentioned by natural language descriptions, which mainly depends on the matching between visual and natural language. Considerable improvement in grounding performance by improving the multi-modal fusion mechanism or bridging the gap between detection and matching, to improve grounding performance. However, several mismatches are ignored, i.e., mismatch in local visual representation and global sentence representation, and mismatch in visual space and corresponding label word space. In this paper, we propose cross-modal match for 3D grounding from mitigating these mismatches perspective. Specifically, to match local visual features with the global description sentence, we propose BEV (Bird's-eye-view) based global information embedding module. It projects multiple object proposal features into the BEV and the relations of different objects are accessed by the visual transformer which can model both positions and features with long-range dependencies. To circumvent the mismatch in feature spaces of different modalities, we propose cross-modal consistency learning. It performs cross-modal consistency constraints to convert the visual feature space into the label word feature space resulting in easier matching. Besides, we introduce label distillation loss and global distillation loss to drive these matches learning in a distillation way. We evaluate our method in mainstream evaluation settings on three datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Cross-Modal Match for Language Conditioned 3D Object Grounding

Information diffusion prediction plays a crucial role in understanding the propagation of information in social networks, encompassing both macroscopic and microscopic prediction tasks. Macroscopic prediction estimates the overall impact of information diffusion, while microscopic prediction focuses on identifying the next user to be influenced. While prior research often concentrates on one of these aspects, a few tackle both concurrently. These two tasks provide complementary insights into the diffusion process at different levels, revealing common traits and unique attributes. The exploration of leveraging common features across these tasks to enhance information prediction remains an underexplored avenue. In this paper, we propose an intuitive and effective model that addresses both macroscopic and microscopic prediction tasks. Our approach considers the interactions and dynamics among cascades at the macro level and incorporates the social homophily of users in social networks at the micro level. Additionally, we introduce adversarial training and orthogonality constraints to ensure the integrity of shared features. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Enhancing Multi-Scale Diffusion Prediction via Sequential Hypergraphs and Adversarial Learning

In this paper, we study the mistake bound of online kernel learning on a budget. We propose a new budgeted online kernel learning model, called Ahpatron, which significantly improves the mistake bound of previous work and resolves an open problem related to upper bounds of hypothesis space constraints. We first present an aggressive variant of Perceptron, named AVP, a model without budget, which uses an active updating rule. Then we design a new budget maintenance mechanism, which removes a half of examples, and projects the removed examples onto a hypothesis space spanned by the remaining examples. Ahpatron adopts the above mechanism to approximate AVP. Theoretical analyses prove that Ahpatron has tighter mistake bounds, and experimental results show that Ahpatron outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on the same or a smaller budget.

Ahpatron: A New Budgeted Online Kernel Learning Machine with Tighter Mistake Bound

How to frame (or crop) a photo often depends on the image subject and its context; e.g., a human portrait. Recent works have defined the subject-aware image cropping task as a nuanced and practical version of image cropping. We propose a weakly-supervised approach (GenCrop) to learn what makes a high-quality, subject-aware crop from professional stock images. Unlike supervised prior work, GenCrop requires no new manual annotations beyond the existing stock image collection. The key challenge in learning from this data, however, is that the images are already cropped and we do not know what regions were removed. Our insight is combine a library of stock images with a modern, pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. The stock image collection provides diversity and its images serve as pseudo-labels for a good crop, while the text-image diffusion model is used to out-paint (i.e., outward inpainting) realistic uncropped images. Using this procedure, we are able to automatically generate a large dataset of cropped-uncropped training pairs to train a cropping model. Despite being weakly-supervised, GenCrop is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised methods and significantly better than comparable weakly-supervised baselines on quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.

Learning Subject-Aware Cropping by Outpainting Professional Photos | VIDEO

Equitability (EQ) in fair division requires that items be allocated such that all agents value the bundle they receive equally. With indivisible items, an equitable allocation may not exist, and hence we instead consider a meaningful analog, EQx, that requires equitability up to any item. EQx allocations exist for monotone, additive valuations. However, if (1) the agents' valuations are not additive or (2) the set of indivisible items includes both goods and chores (positively and negatively valued items), then prior to the current work it was not known whether EQx allocations exist or not. 

We study both the existence and efficient computation of EQx allocations. (1) For monotone valuations (not necessarily additive), we show that EQx allocations always exist. Also, for the large class of weakly well-layered valuations, EQx allocations can be found in polynomial time. Further, we prove that approximately EQx allocations can be computed efficiently under general monotone valuations.  (2) For non-monotone valuations, we show that an EQx allocation may not exist, even for two agents with additive valuations. Under some special cases, however, we show existence and efficient computability of EQx allocations. This includes the case of two agents with additive valuations where each item is either a good for every agent, or a chore for every agent.

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Polyper: Boundary Sensitive Polyp Segmentation

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Not Everything Is Permitted: Constrained Cartesian Abstractions for Optimal Classical Planning