Singapore

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming biomedical imaging, from tumor segmentation to multimodal diagnosis, but reliable deployment in hospitals remains a pressing challenge. Models often struggle with limited labeled data, fail to generalize across scanners and institutions, and lack theoretical guarantees needed for safety-critical decisions. In this talk, I will present our research on overcoming these challenges. I will discuss label-efficient and class-imbalanced learning methods that make effective use of large-scale unlabeled data, theoretical frameworks that embed statistical principles into deep learning for stability and reliability, and medical foundation models that provide universal anatomical priors with lightweight refinement for diverse clinical settings. Together, these advances move biomedical AI beyond benchmark performance toward systems that are robust, generalizable, and clinically actionable.

AAAI 2026

Towards Robust, Reliable, and Generalized Medical AI

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.

Global biodiversity loss is accelerating, prompting international efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to direct resources toward halting species declines. A key challenge in achieving this goal is having access to robust methodologies to understand where species occur and how they relate to each other within broader ecological communities. Recent deep learning-based advances in joint species distribution modeling have shown improved predictive performance, but effectively incorporating community-level learning, taking into account species-species relationships in addition to species-environment relationships, remains an outstanding challenge. We introduce LabelKAN, a novel framework based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to learn inter-species connections from predictions of each label. We model the distributions of avian species and find substantial gains in predictive performance across the vast majority of species. In particular, our method demonstrates strong improvements for rare and difficult-to-predict species, which are often the most important when setting biodiversity targets under frameworks like the GBF. These performance gains also translate to more confident predictions of the species spatial patterns as well as more confident predictions of community structure. We illustrate how the LabelKAN leads to qualitative and quantitative improvements with a focused application on the Great Blue Heron, a keystone species in freshwater ecosystems that has experienced significant population declines across the United States in recent years. Using the LabelKAN framework, we are able to identify communities and species in New York that will be most sensitive to further declines in Great Blue Heron populations. Our results underscore the critical importance of incorporating information on community assemblage in species distribution modeling. By leveraging species co-occurrence patterns, our approach offers deeper ecological insights and supports more informed conservation planning in the face of accelerating biodiversity loss.

LabelKAN - Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Inter-Label Learning: Avian Community Learning

Cross-scene hyperspectral image (HSI) recognition aims to assign a unique label to each pixel in the target scene by transferring knowledge from the source scene. Existing methods primarily rely on fully labeled source data and either partially labeled or unlabeled target data. No prior work has addressed the more challenging scenario of cross-scene recognition without label guidance in both scenes. To bridge this gap, we present the first study on cross-scene HSI clustering, proposing an anchor-guided discriminative subspace alignment and clustering (ADSAC) framework that follows a well-structured three-step learning paradigm to effectively mitigate distribution shifts. Specifically, we first develop an anchor-promoted graph learning (APGL) model to efficiently derive accurate clustering labels for the source scene by leveraging anchor-based structural information. Next, we propose a discriminative cross-scene subspace alignment (DCSA) model to improve feature discriminability and reduce distribution discrepancies. Finally, labels of the target scene are inferred after source clustering and cross-scene alignment. To solve the formulated models, we design tailored optimization algorithms to ensure high-quality learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods.

Anchor-Guided Discriminative Subspace Alignment and Clustering for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Imagery

Recent advancements in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have significantly enhanced performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the variability in data distributions across different domains presents challenges in generalizing these models to unseen domains. Domain generalization offers a promising solution, but existing text domain generalization methods typically rely on adversarial training to learn domain-invariant features, which often leads to models with high computational and memory overhead. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel solution named Generalization via Prompts and Contrastive Learning (GenPromptCL) to enhance the generalization capability in domain generalization. GenPromptCL consists of two key components: Domain-Misleading Prompt Learning (DMPL) and Pseudo Label-based Contrastive Learning (PCL). Specifically, DMPL disrupts domain labels randomly, misleading the model into producing incorrect domain labels. This forces the model to learn domain-invariant features. Meanwhile, PCL generates pseudo labels within a single mini-batch, enabling the model to learn both intra-class and inter-class discriminative representations with low time and space complexity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GenPromptCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on three distinct text classification tasks (sentiment analysis, rumor detection, and natural language inference) while significantly improving model operation efficiency.

Learning Beyond Domains: Misleading Prompts and Pseudo-Label Contrast for Text Domain Generalization

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) for solving question-answer (QA) tasks. The state-of-the-art RAG approaches often use the graph data as the external data since they capture the rich semantic information and link relationships between entities. However, existing graph-based RAG approaches cannot accurately identify the relevant information from the graph and also consume large numbers of tokens in the online retrieval process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel graph-based RAG approach, called Attributed Community-based Hierarchical RAG (ArchRAG), by augmenting the question using attributed communities, and also introducing a novel LLM-based hierarchical clustering method. To retrieve the most relevant information from the graph for the question, we build a novel hierarchical index structure for the attributed communities and develop an effective online retrieval method. Experimental results demonstrate that ArchRAG outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and token cost.

ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Time-frequency analysis (TFA) and mode decomposition for non-stationary signals are research hotspots in the field of signal processing. Current optimization-based decomposition methods require a good initial IF estimate. However, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty, achieving accurate ridge extraction from the time-frequency representation (TFR) necessitates empirical parameter adjustments. In this paper, we propose the TFD-Net framework, which takes time-series signals as inputs and adaptively conducts TFR construction and mode decomposition. Specifically, the framework integrates a physically interpretable TFA encoder and a query-based mode decomposition decoder. The highlights of this study include exploring the mathematical equivalence between deep convolutional operators and classical TFA methods. This enables the extraction of multi-scale features for TFR construction and mode separation in a data-driven manner, eliminating the need for signal-specific manual tuning and enhancing adaptability. Finally, simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate TFD-Net's superior performance over several state-of-the-art methods in complex signal processing.

TFD-Net: Towards Intelligent Time-Frequency Mode Decomposition with Practical Applications

Automated Heuristic Design (AHD) using Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved notable success in recent years. Despite the effectiveness of existing approaches, they only design a single heuristic to serve all problem instances, often inducing poor generalization across different distributions or settings. To address this issue, we propose Automated Heuristic Set Design (AHSD), a new formulation for LLM-driven AHD. The aim of AHSD is to automatically generate a small-sized complementary heuristic set to serve diverse problem instances, such that each problem instance could be optimized by at least one heuristic in this set. We show that the objective function of AHSD is monotone and supermodular. Then, we propose Evolution of Heuristic Set (EoH-S) to apply the AHSD formulation for LLM-driven AHD. With two novel mechanisms of complementary population management and complementary-aware memetic search, EoH-S could effectively generate a set of high-quality and complementary heuristics. Comprehensive experimental results on three AHD tasks with diverse instances spanning various sizes and distributions demonstrate that EoH-S consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art AHD methods and achieves up to 60% performance improvements.

EoH-S: Evolution of Heuristic Set Using LLMs for Automated Heuristic Design

Time series analysis is crucial in various fields such as healthcare and finance. However, environmental variations and the inherent non-stationarity of time series data often lead to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, consequently causing model performance degradation. Most existing OOD generalization methods primarily focus on images or text, leaving time series analysis relatively underexplored. In this paper, we propose COGS, a novel framework that incorporates causal representation learning into the OOD generalization of time series. By imposing structural priors, our method identifies latent variables and learns a causal graph to disentangle causal variables from non-causal ones. These causal variables are then used to learn domain-invariant representations for stable prediction. Moreover, to tackle the challenge of the absence of domain labels, we further introduce a prototype-based domain discovery algorithm that infers domain labels in an unsupervised manner. The entire framework is optimized in a two-phase iterative manner, resulting in robust OOD performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to baseline methods.

COGS: A Causal Representation Learning Framework for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation serves as a key task in the development of endoscopic navigation systems.However, performance degradation persists due to uneven illumination inherent in endoscopy images, particularly in low-intensity regions.Existing low-light enhancement techniques fail to effectively guide the depth network. Furthermore, solutions from other fields, like autonomous driving, require well-lit images, making them unsuitable and increasing data collection burdens.To this end, we present DeLightMono - a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation framework with illumination decoupling.Specifically, endoscopic images are represented by a designed illumination-reflectance-depth model, and are decomposed with auxiliary networks.Moreover, a self-supervised joint-optimizing framework with novel losses leveraging the decoupled components is proposed to mitigate the effects of uneven illumination on depth estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was rigorously verified through extensive comparisons and an ablation study performed on two public datasets.

DeLightMono: Enhancing Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Endoscopy by Decoupling Uneven Illumination

Finding near-optimal solutions for dense multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems in real-time remains challenging even for state-of-the-art planners. To this end, we develop a hybrid framework that integrates a learned heuristic derived from MAGAT, a neural MAPF policy with a graph attention scheme, into a leading search-based algorithm, LaCAM. While prior work has explored learning-guided search in MAPF, such methods have historically underperformed. In contrast, our approach, termed LaGAT, outperforms both purely search-based and purely learning-based methods in dense scenarios. This is achieved through an enhanced MAGAT architecture, a pre-train–then–fine-tune strategy on maps of interest, and a deadlock detection scheme to account for imperfect neural guidance. Our results demonstrate that, when carefully designed, hybrid search offers a powerful solution for tightly coupled, challenging multi-agent coordination problems.

Graph Attention-Guided Search for Dense Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Lead contamination in urban water systems remains a pervasive public health threat, affecting millions of American households and disproportionately endangering vulnerable population groups. Current municipal risk assessment and inspection strategies are overwhelmingly based on random sampling and complaint-driven protocols that overlook spatial complexity, reinforce inequities, and squander limited resources, leaving critical exposure areas unidentified. This paper presents a privacy-preserving framework for predicting lead contamination risk. It draws on partially anonymized residential testing data and applies graph neural networks alongside gradient-boosted ensembles. Specifically, our method integrates spatial Deep Graph Attention Networks classifiers to capture inter-neighborhood contamination dependencies, fuse demographic and spatial evidence, and produce interpretable risk scores. Those scores are actionable by municipal water authorities at the intra-neighborhood level. Through extensive experiments on newly constructed Chicago block-group level datasets, our framework achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.848 and reduces false positive lead contamination by up to 44\% versus spatial-only baselines and 21\% over current practice, without sacrificing recall on contaminated blocks. 
Our approach not only extends technical boundaries in spatial-ensemble learning and privacy-preserving urban health modeling, but also provides policymakers and public health officials with a means to assess and address contamination risks, supporting efforts to protect community health and safety.

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LabelKAN - Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Inter-Label Learning: Avian Community Learning

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Next from AAAI 2026

LabelKAN - Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Inter-Label Learning: Avian Community Learning

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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