Singapore

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly
integrated into daily life, there is a critical need for
developing AI literacy across all educational levels.
However, current AI education remains largely confined to
college-level computer science classrooms with limited
access for K-12 learners. We present the AI Scholars
Program, a novel approach that addresses the AI education
gap by preparing college computing students to serve as AI
education ambassadors in their communities and empowering
K-12 teachers to adopt AI education practices in their
classrooms. This experience report presents the curriculum
and its outcomes after one round of refinement. The program
offers structured AI learning through bi-weekly webinars,
resources, and collaborative opportunities to form teams
and conduct community outreach projects. Our program
invited 63 scholars from 30 institutions across the U.S.,
including 51 college students and 12 K-12 teachers. Their
outreach impacted over 230 K-12 learners. We examine
program outcomes for participants and projects through
pre/post surveys measuring computing attitudes and
self-efficacy for teaching AI, scholar interviews, and
outreach project reports. We share lessons learned and
challenges for designing similar programs, highlighting the
importance of involving educators for effective
community-engaged AI education. The program creates a
sustainable pipeline for college students to develop
technical skills and leadership while addressing K-12 AI
education shortages. We contribute insights for scaling AI
literacy and broadening participation in computing.

AAAI 2026

AI Scholars Program: Scaling AI Literacy Through K-12 Outreach

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>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

Diffusion models have advanced fine-grained garment generation, yet balancing controllability, efficiency, and texture fidelity remains challenging. Adapter-based methods often yield incoherent details, while full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to overwriting pretrained priors.
To address these limitations, we propose IMAGGarment+, an efficient diffusion framework for controllable and high-quality garment synthesis. It comprises two key modules designed for efficient and attribute-aware conditioning.
First, we introduce an attribute-wise feature extractor (AFE) that disentangles key garment attributes, silhouette, logo, position, and color, into parallel latent streams. Each stream is optimized independently via LoRA, ensuring minimal parameter overhead while retaining expressive capacity.
Second, we develop an attribute-adaptive attention (AA) module to inject attribute-specific cues into the generative process through a selective, layer-wise injection strategy. Specifically, silhouette and color features are injected into early decoder layers to guide structural and appearance formation, while logo features are propagated across all layers to ensure cross-scale consistency.
Extensive experiments on fine-grained garment benchmarks demonstrate that IMAGGarment+ outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with less than 20\% additional parameters, validating its effectiveness and efficiency.

IMAGGarment+: Efficient Attribute-Wise Diffusion for Garment Generation

Automatically solving table reasoning tasks remains challenging due to three main factors: (1) diverse and hierarchical table structures that hinder comprehension, (2) the heavy reliance on complex logical and numerical reasoning—which makes purely text-based methods prone to hallucinations—and (3) the necessity of multi-step processing to handle intricate tasks involving multiple and lengthy tables.
To address these challenges, we introduce TaREx, a novel framework that unifies table representation, integrates code-driven execution, and supports interactive multi-step reasoning. TaREx employs a reinforcement learning-based training pipeline to optimize its reasoning policy for complex tasks.
Experimental results show that TaREx achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of table reasoning benchmarks, both in-domain and out-of-domain. These include fundamental tasks such as table question answering (TQA) and table fact verification (TFV), as well as advanced tabular data analysis tasks. The results highlight TaREx’s effectiveness and scalability in advancing automated table reasoning.

TaREx: Reinforcement Learning for Code-Driven Table Reasoning

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved reasoning in text and image domains, yet achieving robust video reasoning remains a significant challenge. Existing video benchmarks mainly assess shallow understanding and reasoning and allow models to exploit global context, failing to rigorously evaluate true causal and stepwise reasoning. We present CausalStep, a benchmark designed for explicit stepwise causal reasoning in videos. CausalStep segments videos into causally linked units and enforces a strict stepwise question-answer (QA) protocol, requiring sequential answers and preventing shortcut solutions. Each question includes carefully constructed distractors based on error type taxonomy to ensure diagnostic value. The benchmark features 100 videos across six categories and 1,852 multiple-choice QA pairs. We introduce seven diagnostic metrics for comprehensive evaluation, enabling precise diagnosis of causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments with leading proprietary and open-source models, as well as human baselines, reveal a significant gap between current models and human-level stepwise reasoning. CausalStep provides a rigorous benchmark to drive progress in robust and interpretable video reasoning.

CausalStep: A Benchmark for Explicit Stepwise Causal Reasoning in Videos

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabeled data by leveraging knowledge from labeled categories.
While existing methods have achieved remarkable progress, they often treat images as flat feature sets, neglecting the intrinsic hierarchy: where key objects dominate meaning and backgrounds serve as context. For instance, in images of a dog either standing on grass or lying on a bed, the dog remains the central semantic element, whereas the background varies. Motivated by this, we propose LEArning Intrinsic Hierarchy (LEAH), a lightweight plug-and-play module designed to model hierarchical structure within images. LEAH consists of two components: a pruner that filters task-irrelevant tokens to extract key objects, and a constructor that embeds key objects and full images into hyperbolic space using adaptive entailment cones to capture compositional semantics. LEAH can be easily integrated into existing GCD frameworks with minimal modification. When applied to SimGCD, it achieves up to 13.2\% accuracy improvement on fine-grained benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in discovering subtle inter-class differences through hierarchical modeling.

Learning Intrinsic Hierarchy for Generalized Category Discovery

Standpoint logics offer unified modal logic-based formalisms for representing multiple heterogeneous viewpoints. At the same time, many non-monotonic reasoning frameworks can be naturally captured using modal logics — in particular using the modal logic S4F. In this work, we propose a novel formalism called S4F Standpoint Logic, which generalises both S4F and standpoint propositional logic and is therefore capable of expressing multi-viewpoint, non-monotonic semantic commitments. We define its syntax and semantics and analyze its computational complexity, obtaining the result that S4F Standpoint Logic is not computationally harder than its constituent logics, whether in monotonic or non-monotonic form. We also outline mechanisms for credulous and sceptical acceptance and illustrate the framework with an example.

Non-Monotonic S4F Standpoint Logic

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) suffers from an inherent mismatch between coarse image-level annotations and dense pixel-level predictions. To bridge this gap, existing methods primarily focus on generating refined class activation maps (CAM) as pseudo-labels. However, we argue that this focus is insufficient as it overlooks a critical component: the segmentation decoder. The decoder is typically trained through superficial alignment of predictions with pseudo-labels in the logit space. Given the noisy nature of such labels, this naive supervision leads to error accumulation and limits performance. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning (UGRL) framework that exerts dual control to reshape the learning process, achieving robust supervision that escapes the CAM shadow. The cornerstone of UGRL is a prototype-driven uncertainty modeling module that estimates the reliability of class-wise supervision. The modeled uncertainty enables two synergistic control mechanisms. First, it adaptively modulates classification and segmentation losses, encouraging the model to learn from more trustworthy signals. Second, it guides the structuring of the decoder’s feature space. Rather than relying solely on superficial alignment, UGRL enforces deeper representation alignment by applying contrastive learning on reliable pixels. This enables rich semantic transfer to fine-grained segmentation details. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method surpasses other state-of-the-art WSSS methods. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UGRL-70C3/.

Escaping the CAM Shadow: Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR-based 3D object detection models often struggle to generalize to real-world environments due to limited object diversity in existing datasets. To tackle it, we introduce the first generalized cross-domain few-shot (GCFS) task in 3D object detection, aiming to adapt a source-pretrained model to both common and novel classes in a new domain with only few-shot annotations. We propose a unified framework that learns stable target semantics under limited supervision by bridging 2D open-set semantics with 3D spatial reasoning. Specifically, an image-guided multi-modal fusion module injects transferable 2D semantic cues into the 3D detection pipeline via vision-language models, while a physically-aware box search enhances 2D-to-3D alignment via LiDAR priors. To capture class-specific semantics from sparse data, we further introduce contrastive-enhanced prototype learning, which encodes few-shot instances into discriminative semantic anchors and stabilizes representation learning. Extensive experiments on four GCFS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach in realistic deployment settings. The code will be publicly available.

From Dataset to Real-world: General 3D Object Detection via Generalized Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

With the growing adoption of Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS), Private Inference (PI) has emerged as a promising solution to address its security concerns through cryptographic techniques. However, nonlinear operations in neural networks contribute the majority of the computational and communication overhead in PI. Existing studies mainly focus on optimizing and reducing the number of ReLU activations in neural networks,but traditional pruning methods may mistakenly remove ReLUs that are critical for maintaining model accuracy. To accurately evaluate the importance of ReLU in the network, we propose ReLUPruner, a method that uses Taylor expansion to accurately quantify the impact on loss before and after ReLU replacement. Furthermore, we establish a hierarchical importance metric to guide layer-wise ReLU budget allocation and adopt a progressive pruning strategy to dynamically adjust the pruning rate of each layer according to the training progress. Extensive experiments on various models and datasets show that ReLUPruner achieves a good balance between ReLU budget and model accuracy, with a 1.89\% improvement over the existing SOTA method 1.89\% (90.12\%, 12.9k ReLU budget, CIFAR10), 3.62\% (77.9\% 50k ReLU budget, CIFAR100) and 2.66\% (56.13\%,30k ReLU budget, Tiny-ImageNet), while achieving superior accuracy even without additional fine-tuning stage.

ReLUPruner: Rethinking ReLU Importance with Taylor Expansion for Efficient Private Inference

Precise detection of driver mental fatigue is critical for reducing traffic accidents and enhancing road safety. Compared with vision-based detection—which is susceptible to illumination and occlusion—multimodal physiological‑signal-based approaches integrate complementary information from diverse biosignals, delivering more faithful and objective fatigue assessments. However, adverse factors such as motion artifacts and environmental noise induce ceaseless deterioration to physiological signals, which markedly degrade the performance of existing multimodal fusion methods. To address this challenge, we propose Multimodal Uncertainty-based Self-driven Evolution, MUSE, reallocating modality contributions in real time via overall uncertainty minimization, thereby enabling efficient collaborative fusion of multi‐source predictions. Theoretically, MUSE guarantees a provably bounded cumulative error, and its generalization error approaches the Bayesian‑optimal fusion as iterations progress. Operating in a closed loop without labels or manual recalibration, MUSE presents superior suitability for real‑world driving scenarios compared to supervised algorithms. On the large‑scale driving fatigue dataset SEED‑VIG, MUSE outperforms existing models in both classification (92.2\% accuracy) and regression tasks, substantiating its robustness and practicality as a promising driving fatigue detection solution.

MUSE: Multimodal Uncertainty-Based Self-Driven Evolution for Robust Physiological-Signal–Based Driver Fatigue Detection

Gaussian Processes (GPs), as a nonparametric learning method, offer flexible modeling capabilities and calibrated uncertainty quantification for function approximations. Additionally, GPs support online learning by efficiently incorporating new data with polynomial-time computation, making them well-suited for safety-critical dynamical systems that require rapid adaptation. However, the inference and online updates of exact GPs, when processing streaming data, incur cubic computation time and quadratic storage memory complexity, limiting their scalability to large datasets in real-time settings. In this paper, we propose a streaming kernel-induced progressively generated expert framework of Gaussian processes (SkyGP) that addresses both computational and memory constraints by maintaining a bounded set of experts, while inheriting the learning performance guarantees from exact Gaussian processes. Furthermore, two SkyGP variants are introduced, each tailored to a specific objective, either maximizing prediction accuracy (SkyGP-Dense) or improving computational efficiency (SkyGP-Fast). The effectiveness of SkyGP is validated through extensive benchmarks and real-time control experiments demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

IMAGGarment+: Efficient Attribute-Wise Diffusion for Garment Generation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

IMAGGarment+: Efficient Attribute-Wise Diffusion for Garment Generation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads