Singapore

Introducing AI concepts in the earliest years of schooling
can help children make sense of intelligent technologies,
yet few resources exist for K–2 classrooms. This paper
presents the design and outcomes of a professional
development (PD) program supporting K–2 teachers as they
explored AI literacy and co-designed unplugged classroom
activities. Grounded in AI4K12’s Five Big Ideas in AI
framework, the PD combined hands-on learning, collaborative
design, and micro-teaching opportunities. Educators created
screen-free, English Language Arts (ELA)-aligned activities
using storytelling, sorting, and embodied play to introduce
AI topics such as machine learning and fairness in
age-appropriate ways. Sample lessons included Train the AI
(pattern recognition), What Happens Next? (equity in
algorithmic decisions), Who Did the Robot Hear? (data
diversity and voice recognition), and Teach the Robot
(guided data-labeling). The PD emphasized integrating AI
into existing K–2 literacy routines, lowering
implementation barriers while supporting vocabulary
development, reasoning, and empathy. Teacher reflections
revealed growing confidence in adapting AI topics for young
learners and highlighted the value of peer collaboration,
clear language, and tactile materials. This work
contributes to the emerging field of early AI education by
demonstrating how co-design and unplugged formats can
empower teachers to introduce foundational AI concepts
through inquiry, play, and literacy-rich (ELA) experiences.

AAAI 2026

Co-Designing Unplugged Learning Activities with K-2 Teachers for Early AI Literacy Education

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.

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have led to the emergence of powerful text-to-video generation models. Despite these successes, evaluating the quality of AIGC-generated videos remains challenging due to limited generalization, lack of temporal awareness, heavy reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, and the lack of effective interaction with generation models. Most current approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs), which often require large-scale annotated datasets and tend to decouple understanding and generation. To address these shortcomings, we propose VQ-Insight, a novel reasoning-style VLM framework for AIGC video quality assessment. Our approach features: (1) a progressive video quality learning scheme that combines image quality warm-up, general task-specific temporal learning, and joint optimization with the video generation model; (2) the design of multi-dimension scoring rewards, preference comparison rewards, and temporal modeling rewards to enhance both generalization and specialization in video quality evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQ-Insight consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in preference comparison, multi-dimension scoring, and natural video scoring, bringing significant improvements for video generation tasks.

VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning

Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links involving unseen entities, making it a particularly challenging task for knowledge representation learning. Traditional embedding-based methods often fall short in this setting due to their limited structural reasoning capabilities. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a promising alternative by explicitly modeling the graph topology. However, their performance heavily relies on the quality of negative samples during training, which significantly influences the learned representations and generalization ability. To tackle this issue, we propose Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling (ARNS), a negative sampling approach specifically tailored for GNN-based inductive KGC. It integrates three key strategies: (1) High-quality negatives via Linear WD for discriminative learning, (2) Relation-aware negatives utilizing relation graphs to preserve structural patterns, as well as (3) Adaptive curriculum learning that dynamically adjusts sampling ratios based on performance feedback. Our key innovation lies in a performance-driven adaptation mechanism that monitors training dynamics and modulates negative sample difficulty. This approach starts with easier samples for stability, and progressively introduces challenging negatives. Experiments demonstrate that ARNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant MRR improvements while maintaining training stability. The adaptive design is particularly beneficial in inductive scenarios, where models can infer structural patterns from limited observations.

ARNS: Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling with Curriculum Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

Recent advancements in multi-robot navigation have explored methods that combine Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like scene understanding or high-level decision-making. However, these approaches face challenges with high inference latency and potential hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, GUIDER, that utilizes an LLM in two different offline roles. First, we leverage the LLM as an offline knowledge source. Its expertise is distilled into a compact model, which is applied only when the RL agent is uncertain about its own value estimates and the model itself is confident in its prediction. Additionally, we utilize the LLM as an offline semantic engine. This process translates the LLM's high-level understanding of situational risk into a dynamic adjustment of the RL agent's behavioral style, evolving a function that optimally balances conservative and aggressive actions. We conduct extensive experiments in both terrestrial and maritime settings. Across all maritime scenarios (3–12 robots), GUIDER improves the task success rate and reduces the collision rate significantly compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based multi-robot navigation methods.

Guided Distillation and Risk Adaptive Evolution for Multi-Robot Navigation

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific knowledge from a pretrained model. Existing methods often rely on retained training data to preserve utility; such dependence is impractical due to privacy and scalability constraints. A further complication arises when unlearning is applied to vision-language models (VLMs), where entangled multimodal representations make targeted forgetting especially challenging.
We propose DIET, a principled **retain-data-free unlearning** method for VLMs that addresses these challenges by leveraging the geometry of hyperbolic space. The core idea is to push forget embeddings toward class-mismatched prototypes located at the boundary of the hyperbolic space. In hyperbolic geometry, points near the boundary become infinitely distant from interior points. As a result, moving forget embeddings to the boundary makes their influence on the model asymptotically negligible. To formalize this, we guide the forgetting process using the Busemann function, which quantifies directional distance to the boundary. We further develop an adaptive scheme based on optimal transport that selects mismatched prototypes for each forget embedding, enabling flexible unlearning dynamics.
Extensive experiments on fine-grained datasets such as Flowers102, OxfordPets, and StanfordCars show that DIET achieves an average forget accuracy of 8.06\%, while preserving 69.04\% utility using only 16 samples per concept, significantly outperforming the best retain-free baselines with a **117.5\%** in model utility, 
and showing competitive performance to retain-data baselines with only a **3.79\%** drop

DIET: Machine Unlearning on a Data-Diet

The primary goal of 3D point cloud completion is to reconstruct complete and high-resolution point clouds from incomplete and low-resolution inputs. While some recent approaches have achieved satisfactory completion performance by incorporating additional images, there remains room for improvement in fully exploiting and utilizing the rich geometric relation information contained in parts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network (SGPRNet) for Point Cloud Completion. Its core innovation lies in establishing part semantic relations to guide the reconstruction of structurally consistent local geometries. Specifically, we utilize Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) to automatically generate the specific text of 3D shape, which provides detailed geometric part relations descriptions. Building upon this, we design an Orthogonal Semantic Part Transfer (OSPT) module that learns transferable semantic relations between geometric parts. Subsequently, we develop a Semantic Geometric Relation-aware Transformer (SGRFormer) to progressively refine these semantic features, enhancing point cloud representation and guiding the generation of fine local structures. In addition, we establish a point-text pairs corpus, OmniObject3D-212/34 and Text-ViPC datasets based on existing OmniObject3D and ShapeNet-ViPC datasets, incorporating the specific text. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art completion methods.

Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion

Alignment plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLMs) in aligning with human preferences on a specific task/domain. Traditional alignment methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously learned values when adapting to new preferences or domains. We introduce LifeAlign, a novel framework for lifelong alignment that enables LLMs to maintain consistent human preference alignment across sequential learning tasks without forgetting previously learned values. Our approach consists of two key innovations. First, we propose a focalized preference optimization strategy that aligns LLMs with new preferences while preventing the erosion of alignment acquired from previous tasks. Second, we develop a short-to-long memory consolidation mechanism that merges denoised short-term preference representations into stable long-term memory using intrinsic dimensionality reduction, enabling efficient storage and retrieval of alignment patterns across diverse domains. We evaluate LifeAlign across multiple sequential alignment tasks spanning different domains and preference types. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in maintaining both preference alignment quality and knowledge retention compared to existing lifelong learning approaches.

LifeAlign: Lifelong Alignment for Large Language Models with Memory-Augmented Focalized Preference Optimization

Commercial-grade poster design demands the seamless integration of aesthetic appeal with precise, informative content delivery. Current automated poster generation systems face significant limitations, including incomplete design workflows, poor text rendering accuracy, and insufficient flexibility for commercial applications. To address these challenges, we propose PosterVerse, a full-workflow, commercial-grade poster generation method that seamlessly automates the entire design process while delivering high-density and scalable text rendering. PosterVerse replicates professional design through three key stages: (1) blueprint creation using fine-tuned LLMs to extract key design elements from user requirements, (2) graphical background generation via customized diffusion models to create visually appealing imagery, and (3) unified layout-text rendering with an MLLM-powered HTML engine to guarantee high text accuracy and flexible customization. In addition, we introduce PosterDNA, a commercial-grade, HTML-based dataset tailored for training and validating poster design models. To the best of our knowledge, PosterDNA is the first Chinese poster generation dataset to introduce HTML typography files, enabling scalable text rendering and fundamentally solving the challenges of rendering small and high-density text. Experimental results demonstrate that PosterVerse consistently produces commercial-grade posters with appealing visuals, accurate text alignment, and customizable layouts, making it a promising solution for automating commercial poster design. Dataset and code will be publicly available.

PosterVerse: A Full-Workflow Framework for Commercial-Grade Poster Generation with HTML-Based Scalable Typography

We study streaming data with categorical features where the universe of distinct categorical items is not known in advance and can even grow unboundedly over time.
Feature hashing is commonly used as a pre-processing step to map these categorical values into a feature space of fixed size before learning their embeddings \citep{coleman2023unified, desai2022random}. While these methods have been developed and evaluated for offline or batch settings, in this paper we consider online settings. 
We show that deterministic embeddings suffer from forgetting in online learning, leading to performance deterioration. 
To mitigate this issue, we propose a \textit{probabilistic hash embedding} (PHE) model that treats hash embeddings as stochastic and applies Bayesian online learning to learn incrementally from data. 
Based on the structure of PHE, we derive a scalable inference algorithm to learn model parameters and infer/update the posteriors of hash embeddings and other latent variables. 
Our algorithm (i) can handle an evolving vocabulary of categorical items, (ii) is adaptive to new items without forgetting old items, (iii) is implementable with a bounded set of parameters that does not grow with the number of distinct observed values on the stream, and (iv) is efficiently implementable both in the offline and the online streaming setting. 
Experiments in classification, sequence modeling, and recommendation systems in online learning setups demonstrate the superior performance of PHE while maintaining high memory efficiency (consumes as low as 2~4% memory of a one-hot embedding table).

Probabilistic Hash Embeddings for Online Learning of Categorical Features

The long-term progression of neurodegenerative diseases is commonly conceptualized as a spatiotemporal diffusion process that consists of a graph diffusion process across the structural brain connectome and a localized reaction process within brain regions. However, modeling this progression remains challenging due to 1) the scarcity of longitudinal data obtained through irregular and infrequent subject visits and 2) the complex interplay of pathological mechanisms across brain regions and disease stages, where traditional models assume fixed mechanisms throughout disease progression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel stage-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that explicitly models how different contributing mechanisms dominate at different disease stages through time-dependent expert weighting. This architecture is a key innovation designed to maximize the utility of small datasets and provide interpretable insights into disease etiology. Data-wise, we utilize an iterative dual optimization method to properly estimate the temporal position of individual observations, constructing a cohort-level progression trajectory from irregular snapshots. Model-wise, we enhance the spatial component with an inhomogeneous graph neural diffusion model (IGND) that allows diffusivity to vary based on node states and time, providing more flexible representations of brain networks. We also introduce a localized neural reaction module to capture complex dynamics beyond standard processes.The resulting IGND-MoE model dynamically integrates these components across temporal states, offering a principled way to understand how stage-specific pathological mechanisms contribute to progression. When used to model tau pathology propagation in human brains, IGND-MoE outperforms purely pathophysiological and purely neural baselines in long-term prediction accuracy. Moreover, its stage-wise weights yield novel clinical insights that align with literature, suggesting that graph-related processes are more influential at early stages, while other unknown physical processes become dominant later on. Our findings highlight the necessity of designing hybrid and expert-constrained models that account for the evolving nature of neurodegenerative processes.

A Stage-Aware Mixture of Experts Framework for Neurodegenerative Disease Progression Modelling

Recent self-supervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. 
However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. 
This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. 
To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. 
Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. 
A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. 
Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks. 
Our code and pretrained models shall be released upon the acceptance of this work.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning

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

VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads