Singapore

Rapid post‑earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for early-stage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008–2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage: Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks&#39; rich, ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario. All data and code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

EIDSeg: A Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Post-Earthquake Damage Assessment from Social Media Images

Rapid post‑earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for early-stage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008–2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage: Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks' rich, ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario. All data and code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

poster

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.

Self Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for label-efficient learning, and has been widely utilized by remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs). Recent RSFMs including SatMAE and DoFA primarily rely on masked autoencoding (MAE), contrastive learning or some combination of them. However, these pretext tasks often overlook the unique temporal characteristics of agricultural landscape, namely nature's cycle of sowing, growth, and harvest. Motivated by this gap, we propose three novel agriculture-specific pretext tasks, namely Time-Difference Prediction (TD), Temporal Frequency Prediction (FP), and Future-Frame Prediction (FF). Comprehensive evaluation on SICKLE dataset shows FF achieves 69.6% IoU on crop mapping and FP reduces yield prediction error to 30.7% MAPE, outperforming all baselines, and TD remains competitive on most tasks. Further, we also scale FF to the national scale of India, achieving 54.2% IoU outperforming all baselines on field boundary delineation on FTW India dataset.

Time2Agri: Temporal Pretext Tasks for Agricultural Monitoring

Scientific image manipulation in biomedical publications poses a growing threat to research integrity and reproducibility. Unlike natural image forensics, biomedical forgery detection is uniquely challenging due to domain-specific artifacts, complex textures, and unstructured figure layouts. We present the first vision-language guided framework for both generating and detecting biomedical image forgeries. By combining diffusion-based synthesis with vision-language prompting, our method enables realistic and semantically controlled manipulations—including duplication, splicing, and region removal—across diverse biomedical modalities. We introduce Rescind, a large-scale benchmark featuring fine-grained annotations and modality-specific splits, and propose Integscan, a structured state-space modeling framework that integrates attention-enhanced visual encoding with prompt-conditioned semantic alignment for precise forgery localization. To ensure semantic fidelity, we incorporate a VLM-based verification loop that filters generated forgeries based on consistency with intended prompts. Extensive experiments on Rescind and existing benchmarks demonstrate that Integscan achieves state-of-the-art performance in both detection and localization, establishing a strong foundation for automated scientific integrity analysis.

Rescind: Countering Image Misconduct in Biomedical Publications with Vision-Language and State-Space Modeling

The meta-analysis's utility is dependent on previous studies having accurately captured the variables of interest, but in medical studies, a key decision variable that impacts a physician's decisions was not captured. This results in an unknown effect size and unreliable conclusions. A Bayesian approach may allow analysis to determine if the claim of a positive effect is still warranted, and we build a Bayesian approach to this common medical scenario. To demonstrate its utility, we assist professional OBGYNs in evaluating Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section (TOLAC) situations where few interventions are available for patients and find the support needed for physicians to advance patient care.

Bayesian Meta-Analyses Could Be More: A Case Study in Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section Outcomes and Complications

Studies of LLMs’ political opinions mainly evaluate their open-ended responses. Recent work indicates misalignment between LLMs responses and their internal intentions. This motivates us to probe LLMs' internal mechanisms and uncover their internal political states. Additionally, analysis of LLMs' political opinions often relies on single-axis concepts, which can lead to concept confounds.

Our work extends this to multi-dimensions and applies interpretable techniques for more transparent LLM political concept learning. Specifically, we designed a four-dimensional political learning framework and constructed a corresponding dataset for fine-grained political concept vector learning. These vectors can detect and intervene in LLM internals. 

Experiments are conducted on eight open-source LLMs with three representation engineering techniques. Results show these vectors can disentangle political concept confounds. Detection tasks validate the semantic meaning of the vectors and show good generalization and robustness in OOD settings. Intervention experiments show that these vectors can implicitly intervene in LLMs, generating responses with targeted political leanings. These insights reveal the need for more transparent auditing for future AI governance.

Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models

AI models are often evaluated based on their ability to predict the outcome of interest. However, in many AI for social impact applications, the presence of an intervention that affects the outcome can bias the evaluation. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) randomly assign interventions, so data from the control group can be used to generate unbiased model performance estimates. However, this approach is inefficient because it ignores data from the treatment group. Given the complexity and cost often associated with RCTs, making the most use of the data is essential. Thus, we investigate model evaluation strategies that leverage all data from an RCT. First, we theoretically quantify estimation bias from naïvely aggregating performance estimates with data from treatment and control groups, and derive the condition under which the bias leads to incorrect model selection. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose an unbiased evaluation strategy that reweights data from the treatment group to mimic the distributions of samples that would or would not experience the outcome under no intervention. Using synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our proposed evaluation approach consistently leads to better model selection than the standard approach that ignores data from the treatment group across various intervention effect and sample size settings. Our contribution represents a meaningful step towards more efficient model evaluation in real-world contexts.

Measuring Model Performance in the Presence of an Intervention

Personalized AI applications such as DreamBooth enable the generation of customized content from user images, but they also raise significant privacy concerns, particularly the risk of facial identity leakage. Recent defense mechanisms like Anti-DreamBooth attempt to mitigate this risk by injecting adversarial perturbations into user photos to prevent successful personalization. However, we identify two critical yet overlooked limitations of these methods. First, the adversarial examples often exhibit perceptible artifacts such as conspicuous patterns or stripes, making them easily detectable as manipulated content. Second, the perturbations are highly fragile, as even simple, non-learned filtering operations can effectively remove them, thereby restoring the model's ability to memorize and reproduce the user's identity. To investigate this vulnerability, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing defenses under realistic purification threats, including both traditional image filters and adversarial purification methods. Our results reveal that none of the current methods maintains their protective effectiveness under such threats. These findings highlight that current defenses offer a false sense of security and underscore the urgent need for more imperceptible and robust protections to safeguard user identity in personalized generation.

Fragile by Design: On the Limits of Adversarial Defenses in Personalized DreamBooth Generation

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are critical to patient survival in emergencies, but first responders often face intense cognitive demands in high-stakes situations. AI cognitive assistants, acting as virtual partners, have the potential to ease this burden by supporting real-time data collection and decision making. In pursuit of this vision, we introduce EgoEMS, the first end-to-end, high-fidelity, multimodal, multiperson dataset capturing over 20 hours of realistic, procedural EMS activities from an egocentric view in 233 simulated emergency scenarios performed by 62 participants, including 46 EMS professionals. Developed in collaboration with EMS experts and aligned with national standards, EgoEMS is captured using an open-source, low-cost, and replicable data collection system and is annotated with keysteps, timestamped audio transcripts with speaker diarization, action quality metrics, and bounding boxes with segmentation masks. Emphasizing realism, the dataset includes responder-patient interactions reflecting real-world emergency dynamics. 
We also present a suite of benchmarks for real-time multimodal keystep recognition and action quality estimation, essential for developing AI support tools for EMS. 
We hope EgoEMS inspires the research community to push the boundaries of intelligent EMS systems and ultimately contribute to improved patient outcomes.
$\textit{The dataset and codebase will be made publicly available upon publication.}$

EgoEMS: A High-Fidelity Multimodal Egocentric Dataset for Cognitive Assistance in Emergency Medical Services

About 25\% of the world’s population live in informal urban settlements containing densely packed buildings (approximately 8,000 houses per $km^2$) which do not lend themselves favorably to state-of-the-art satellite-based building segmentation methods due to, for example, occlusion, vegetation, shadows and low resolution. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel instance segmentation and counting approach for dense buildings. Our system first extracts a conservative set of tentative building center points using a deep network for jumpstarting a Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) module to produce an initial over-segmentation. Second, we use a graph neural network to refine the over-segmented regions into polygons representing accurate building masks. Experiments show that our approach achieves higher accuracy in instance segmentation and counting especially in challenging densely packed buildings areas in Brazil, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and Kenya, for instance.

Building Instance Segmentation for Dense Urban Settlements

Language acquisition is vital to reveal the nature of human language intelligence and has recently emerged as a promising lens for improving the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). However, due to ethical and practical constraints, many experiments that require controlling language inputs remain infeasible with human learners. This poses challenges for the verifiability and scalability of language acquisition modeling, particularly in Chinese second language acquisition (SLA). While LLMs provide a controllable and reproducible alternative, a systematic benchmark to support phase-wise modeling and assessment is still lacking. To address these issues, we propose HSKBenchmark, the first benchmark for staged modeling and writing assessment of LLMs in Chinese SLA. It spans HSK levels 3 to 6, comprising authentic textbooks with 6.76M tokens, 16K synthetic instruction data, 30 test titles and a linguistically-grounded evaluation system. To simulate human acquisition trajectories, a curriculum-tuning framework is introduced, which trains LLMs in a progression from beginner to advanced materials. In addition, since language production in writing is a key perspective for observing SLA development, we establish the evaluation system including the coverage of level-based grammar items, writing errors, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and holistic scoring to probe LLMs in writing. We also develop an HSKAgent fine-tuned on 10K compositions from Chinese second language learners to automate this evaluation system. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HSKBenchmark not only models Chinese SLA effectively, but also serves as a reliable benchmark for dynamic writing assessment in LLMs. Our fine-tuned LLMs have writing performance on par with advanced human learners and exhibit human-like acquisition characteristics. The HSKBenchmark, HSKAgent, and checkpoints serve as foundational tools and resources, paving the way for future research on language acquisition modeling and LLMs interpretability. Code and data are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HSKB-5E70.

HSKBenchmark: Modeling and Benchmarking Chinese Second Language Acquisition in Large Language Models Through Curriculum Tuning

Data filtering strategies are a crucial component to develop safe Large Language Models (LLM), since they support the removal of harmful contents from pretraining datasets. There is a lack of research on the actual impact of these strategies on vulnerable groups to discrimination, though, and their effectiveness has not been yet systematically addressed. In this paper we present a benchmark study of data filtering strategies for harm reduction aimed at providing a systematic evaluation on these approaches. We provide an overview 55 technical reports of English LMs and LLMs to identify the existing filtering strategies in literature and implement an experimental setting to test their impact against vulnerable groups. Our results show that the positive impact that strategies have in reducing harmful contents from documents has the side effect of increasing the underrepresentation of vulnerable groups to discrimination in datasets.

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Time2Agri: Temporal Pretext Tasks for Agricultural Monitoring

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