Singapore

Child malnutrition remains a global crisis, yet existing screening methods are laborious and poorly scalable, hindering early intervention. In this work, we present NutriScreener, a retrieval-augmented, multi-pose graph attention network that combines CLIP-based visual embeddings, class-boosted knowledge retrieval, and context awareness to enable robust malnutrition detection and anthropometric prediction from children&#39;s images, simultaneously addressing generalizability and class-imbalance. In a clinical study, doctors rated it 4.3/5 for accuracy and 4.6/5 for efficiency, confirming its deployment readiness in low-resource settings. Trained and tested on 2,141 children from AnthroVision and additionally evaluated on diverse cross-continent populations, including ARAN and an in-house Adult dataset. It achieves 0.79 recall, 0.82 AUC, and significantly lower anthropometric RMSEs, demonstrating reliable measurement in unconstrained, pediatric settings. Cross-dataset results show up to 25\% recall gain and up to 3.5 cm RMSE reduction using demographically matched knowledge bases. NutriScreener offers a scalable and accurate solution for early malnutrition detection in low-resource environments.

AAAI 2026

NutriScreener: Retrieval Augmented Multi-Pose Graph Attention Network for Malnourishment Screening

Child malnutrition remains a global crisis, yet existing screening methods are laborious and poorly scalable, hindering early intervention. In this work, we present NutriScreener, a retrieval-augmented, multi-pose graph attention network that combines CLIP-based visual embeddings, class-boosted knowledge retrieval, and context awareness to enable robust malnutrition detection and anthropometric prediction from children's images, simultaneously addressing generalizability and class-imbalance. In a clinical study, doctors rated it 4.3/5 for accuracy and 4.6/5 for efficiency, confirming its deployment readiness in low-resource settings. Trained and tested on 2,141 children from AnthroVision and additionally evaluated on diverse cross-continent populations, including ARAN and an in-house Adult dataset. It achieves 0.79 recall, 0.82 AUC, and significantly lower anthropometric RMSEs, demonstrating reliable measurement in unconstrained, pediatric settings. Cross-dataset results show up to 25\% recall gain and up to 3.5 cm RMSE reduction using demographically matched knowledge bases. NutriScreener offers a scalable and accurate solution for early malnutrition detection in low-resource environments.

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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 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.

While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, systematically evaluating undesirable behaviors of these models remains critical. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users.

LLM Targeted Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users

Automated interpretation of medical images demands robust modeling of complex visual-semantic relationships while addressing annotation scarcity, label imbalance, and clinical plausibility constraints. We introduce MIRNet (Medical Image Reasoner Network), a novel framework that integrates self-supervised pre-training with constrained graph-based reasoning. Tongue image diagnosis is a particularly challenging domain that requires fine-grained visual and semantic understanding. Our approach leverages self-supervised masked autoencoder (MAE) to learn transferable visual representations from unlabeled data; employs graph attention networks (GAT) to model label correlations through expert-defined structured graphs; enforces clinical priors via constraint-aware optimization using KL divergence and regularization losses; and mitigates imbalance using asymmetric loss (ASL) and boosting ensembles. To address annotation scarcity, we also introduce TongueAtlas-4K, a comprehensive expert-curated benchmark comprising 4,000 images annotated with 22 diagnostic labels–representing the largest public dataset in tongue analysis. Validation shows our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. While optimized for tongue diagnosis, the framework readily generalizes to broader diagnostic medical imaging tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zijie8247/MIRNet.

MIRNet: Integrating Constrained Graph-Based Reasoning with Pre-training for Diagnostic Medical Imaging

Understanding the communicative behaviors of non- and minimally-speaking individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other complex neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) remains a critical challenge for both clinical support and machine learning research. However, developing automated systems for this task is hindered by data scarcity, privacy concerns, heterogeneous and idiosyncratic actions, and the significant domain shift from neurotypical to neurodiverse populations. To address these challenges, we first present a novel, large-scale, privacy-preserving 3D skeleton action recognition dataset with 2,721 samples capturing in-home interactions of nonverbal individuals with ASD and complex NDDs. Second, we propose AXON, a novel cross-modal knowledge distillation method that transfers the rich semantic understanding of a pre-trained CLIP model to a graph-based skeleton model, outperforming other cross-modal knowledge distillation baselines in classifying subtle communicative acts. We further introduce a gradient-based interpretability analysis method to characterize how individuals with ASD and complex NDDs perform communicative actions. Our analysis reveals both population- and individual-level communicative styles, showcasing individual biases and idiosyncratic movements. Our foundational study helps the development of more adaptive and personalized augmentative technologies, aiming to foster greater communicative autonomy and understanding for this underserved population.

AXON: Action Characterization Through Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Neurodiverse Individuals

Invasive mechanical ventilation (MV) is a life-sustaining therapy commonly used in the intensive care unit (ICU) for patients with severe and acute conditions. These patients frequently rely on MV for breathing. Given the high risk of death in such cases, optimal MV settings can reduce mortality, minimize ventilator-induced lung injury, shorten ICU stays, and ease the strain on healthcare resources. However, optimizing MV settings remains a complex and error-prone process due to patient-specific variability. While Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise for optimizing MV settings, current methods struggle with the hybrid (continuous and discrete) nature of MV settings. Discretizing continuous settings leads to exponential growth in the action space, which limits the number of optimizable settings. Converting the predictions back to continuous can cause a distribution shift, compromising safety and performance.
To address this challenge, we constrain the action space and employ factored action critics. This approach allows us to scale to six optimizable settings compared to 2-3 in previous studies. 
We adapt SOTA offline RL algorithms to operate directly on hybrid action spaces, avoiding the pitfalls of discretization. 
We also introduce a clinically grounded reward function based on ventilator-free days and physiological targets. Using multi-objective optimization for reward selection, we show that this leads to a more equitable consideration of all clinically relevant objectives.
Notably, we develop a system in close collaboration with healthcare professionals that is aligned with real-world clinical objectives and designed with future deployment in mind.

Advancing Safe Mechanical Ventilation Using Offline RL with Hybrid Actions and Clinically Aligned Rewards

Online peer-support communities are vital for mental health, but their therapeutic benefit hinges on receiving a timely and helpful first reply. Posts that languish unanswered can exacerbate feelings of distress and abandonment. This paper develops and validates an integrated framework to predict, explain, and reduce this ``reply gap" on Reddit. First, using survival analysis on over 91,000 posts (2018–2025), we show that a deep learning model (DySurv) can accurately predict reply times (C-Index = 0.742), with a post's lexico-semantic content being a far stronger predictor than author history. Second, moving from correlation to causation, we use a causal inference framework on 48,612 posts to estimate the effect of different support types. We find that initial replies providing emotional support are most effective, increasing the odds of a positive user response by 49% (OR=1.49), an effect most pronounced for high-risk users. Third, we operationalize these insights in RiskMatch, a recommender system that routes at-risk posts to historically effective helpers. Rigorous counterfactual evaluation using inverse propensity scoring (IPS)—a method that corrects for biases in historical data—demonstrates that our system reduces the median wait time by 26 minutes for the highest-risk quintile. This work provides a validated, data-driven methodology to build more responsive and effective peer-support ecosystems, offering a concrete pathway to ensure fewer calls for help go unanswered.

Mind the Gap: Predicting, Explaining and Reducing Time-to-First-Comment (Reply Gap) in Online Mental-Health Communities

Few-shot multimodal industrial anomaly detection is a critical yet underexplored task, offering the ability to quickly adapt to complex industrial scenarios. In few-shot settings, insufficient training samples often fail to cover the diverse patterns present in test samples. This challenge can be mitigated by extracting structural commonality from a small number of training samples. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot unsupervised multimodal industrial anomaly detection method based on structural commonality, CIF (Commonality In Few). To extract intra-class structural information, we employ hypergraphs, which are capable of modeling higher-order correlations, to capture the structural commonality within training samples, and use a memory bank to store this intra-class structural prior. Firstly, we design a semantic-aware hypergraph construction module tailored for single-semantic industrial images, from which we extract common structures to guide the construction of the memory bank. Secondly, we use a training-free hypergraph message passing module to update the visual features of test samples, reducing the distribution gap between test features and features in the memory bank. We further propose a hyperedge-guided memory search module, which utilizes structural information to assist the memory search process and reduce the false positive rate. Experimental results on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and the Eyecandies dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in few-shot settings.

Commonality in Few: Few-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Memory

Unsupervised cross-modal hashing has gained significant attention for efficient retrieval between heterogeneous modalities through encoding data into the unified binary representations, offering low storage cost and fast response. However, the constraints of existing methods persist in bridging the cross-modal semantic gap and capturing fine-grained global semantic structures without explicit labels. In this paper, we propose an innovative unsupervised Stationary distribution and soft Clustering Transformer Hashing approach for cross-modal retrieval, denoted as SCTH. Initially, a Transformer-based modality fusion encoder is employed to extract abundant cross-modal semantic representations, further integrated with contrastive hashing to minimize the semantic gap. To enhance the inter-modal alignment, a pseudo-classifier clustering module with entropy-regularized contrastive loss is presented, ensuring balanced and diverse cluster assignments in unsupervised settings. Additionally, a Markovian stationary distribution strategy stabilizes the feature representations through mitigating the interference of noise and outliers. Comprehensive experiments on MIRFlickr, NUS-WIDE, and IAPR-TC12 datasets validate that SCTH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks, demonstrating superior generalization performance.

Stationary and Clustering Transformer Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval

High spatio‑temporal resolution novel‑view scene rendering is crucial for applications such as sports analysis and scientific experiments. However, existing Dynamic Scene Rendering (DSR) approaches typically rely on conventional RGB cameras with limited frame rates, making it difficult to achieve high spatio‑temporal resolution. In this paper, we present BulletTime4D, a high spatio‑temporal resolution DSR framework, which is the first trial to integrate a spike camera with binocular RGB cameras for dynamic scene reconstruction. Specifically, we first develop a hybrid camera prototype and build a real‑world dynamic scene reconstruction dataset. Then, BulletTime4D presents a multi‑timescale deformation representation by combining low‑frequency spatio‑temporal features with high‑frequency inter‑frame motion features. Finally, a rendering network is designed capable of projecting 4D Gaussians into the spike domain for spike rendering, and a cross‑domain supervision strategy is proposed to achieve high‑frame‑rate texture and color rendering. The results show that BulletTime4D outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on both simulated and real‑world datasets. In addition, BulletTime4D can synthesize 300 FPS novel‑view renderings using stereo RGB cameras at 30 FPS and a single spike camera. Dataset description and more technical details are available in the Appendix.

BulletTime4D: Towards High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Dynamic Scene Rendering via Spike-Guided Stereo Vision

Recognizing fine-grained actions from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences remains a significant challenge, particularly in real-world scenarios where online pose estimation often yields substantial missing data. Existing methods often struggle to accurately recover temporal dynamics and fine-grained spatial structures, resulting in the loss of subtle motion cues crucial for distinguishing similar actions. To address this, we propose FineTec, a unified framework for Fine-grained action recognition under Temporal Corruption. 
FineTec first restores a base skeleton sequence from corrupted input using context-aware completion with diverse temporal masking. 
Next, a skeleton-based spatial decomposition module partitions the skeleton into five semantic regions, further divides them into dynamic and static subgroups based on motion variance, and generates two augmented skeleton sequences via targeted perturbation. These, along with the base sequence, are then processed by a physics-driven estimation module, which utilizes Lagrangian dynamics to estimate joint accelerations. Finally, both the fused skeleton position sequence and the fused acceleration sequence are jointly fed into a GCN-based action recognition head. Extensive experiments on both coarse-grained (NTU-60, NTU-120) and fine-grained (Gym99, Gym288) benchmarks show that FineTec significantly outperforms previous methods under various levels of temporal corruption. Specifically, FineTec achieves top-1 accuracies of 89.1% and 78.1% on the challenging Gym99-severe and Gym288-severe settings, respectively, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability.

FineTec: Fine-Grained Action Recognition Under Temporal Corruption via Skeleton Decomposition and Sequence Completion

Autoregressive models, built based on the Next Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm, show great potential in developing a unified framework that integrates both language and vision tasks. Pioneering works introduce NTP to autoregressive visual generation tasks. In this work, we rethink the NTP for autoregressive image generation and extend it to a novel Next Patch Prediction (NPP) paradigm. Our key idea is to group and aggregate image tokens into patch tokens with higher information density. By using patch tokens as a more compact input sequence, the autoregressive model is trained to predict the next patch, significantly reducing computational costs. To further exploit the natural hierarchical structure of image data, we propose a multi-scale coarse-to-fine patch grouping strategy. With this strategy, the training process begins with a large patch size and ends with vanilla NTP where the patch size is 1x1, thus maintaining the original inference process without modifications. Extensive experiments across a diverse range of model sizes demonstrate that NPP could reduce the training cost to around 0.6 times while improving image generation quality by up to 1.0 FID score on the ImageNet 256x256 generation benchmark. Notably, our method retains the original autoregressive model architecture without introducing additional trainable parameters or specifically designing a custom image tokenizer, offering a flexible and plug-and-play solution for enhancing autoregressive visual generation.

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