Singapore

From expert AI systems of the 1970s to self-supervised
systems of the 2020s, the pendulum of AI development has
swung from heavy reliance on human feedback to no or
minimal reliance in the last 50 years. Self-supervised
approaches have contributed significantly to the success
and scalable development of AI. However, today we are at a
tipping point where the future of AI, and whether so-ciety
ends up benefiting from this technology in the long run,
depends critically on the subsequent AI develop-ment
aligning with human goals and values. Realizing this, there
has been ramping up of efforts to align AI models with
human expectations and values. Human feedback, however,
remains limited and difficult to elicit. Thus, a key
question lingers – how can we scale up alignment of AI
systems with individual expectations and societal norms?
This talk and paper provides an overview and perspective on
efforts at answering this question.

AAAI 2026

Scaling Up AI Alignment

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.

The development of novel effective medical treatments is one of the most important and expected beneficial effects of the AI revolution. This decade is witnessing the rise of AI models able to predict complex properties for protein-protein interactions that hold great promise in assisting in the development of antibody therapeutics and vaccines, including for diseases that long eluded us in the pursuit of an effective treatment. This paper introduces this area of research in a language accessible to an AI researcher, exploring the biological problems that can be solved by AI models, as well as the general context to make solutions feasible in practical scenarios. We survey the main current trends and works in this research area and point towards current still unsolved challenges and trade offs. We expect this paper will be extremely helpful for AI researchers trying to join the field, as well as for researchers already working in one of the subtopics that wish to have a better understanding of the general context around it.

Machine Learning Models Assisting the Development of Antibody Therapeutics and Vaccines – an Emerging Trend

Minimal parametrization of 3D lines plays a critical role in camera localization and structural mapping. 
Existing representations in robotics and computer vision predominantly handle independent lines, 
overlooking structural regularities such as sets of parallel lines that are pervasive in man-made environments. 
This paper introduces \textbf{RiemanLine}, a unified minimal representation for 3D lines formulated on Riemannian manifolds that jointly accommodates both individual lines and parallel-line groups. 
Our key idea is to decouple each line landmark into global and local components: 
a shared vanishing direction optimized on the unit sphere $\mathcal{S}^2$, 
and scaled normal vectors constrained on orthogonal subspaces, enabling compact encoding of structural regularities. 
For $n$ parallel lines, the proposed representation reduces the parameter space from $4n$ (orthonormal form) to $2n+2$, naturally embedding parallelism without explicit constraints. 
We further integrate this parameterization into a factor graph framework, allowing global direction alignment and local reprojection optimization within a unified manifold-based bundle adjustment. 
Extensive experiments on ICL-NUIM, TartanAir, and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significantly more accurate pose estimation and line reconstruction, while reducing parameter dimensionality and improving convergence stability.

RiemanLine: Riemannian Manifold Representation of 3D Lines for Factor Graph Optimization

Humanoid robots are promising to learn a diverse set of human-like locomotion behaviors, including standing up, walking, running, and jumping. However, existing methods predominantly require training independent policies for each skill, yielding behavior-specific controllers that exhibit limited generalization and brittle performance when deployed on irregular terrains and in diverse situations. To address this challenge, we propose Adaptive Humanoid Control (AHC) that adopts a two-stage framework to learn an adaptive humanoid locomotion controller across different skills and terrains. Specifically, we first train several primary locomotion policies and perform a multi-behavior distillation process to obtain a basic multi-behavior controller, facilitating adaptive behavior switching based on the environment. Then, we perform reinforced fine-tuning by collecting online feedback in performing adaptive behaviors on more diverse terrains, enhancing terrain adaptability for the adaptive behavior controller. We conduct experiments in both simulation and real-world experiments in Unitree G1 robots. The results show that our method exhibits strong adaptability across various situations and terrains.

Towards Adaptive Humanoid Control via Multi-Behavior Distillation and Reinforced Fine-Tuning

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.

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

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.

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Machine Learning Models Assisting the Development of Antibody Therapeutics and Vaccines – an Emerging Trend

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Next from AAAI 2026

Machine Learning Models Assisting the Development of Antibody Therapeutics and Vaccines – an Emerging Trend

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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