Singapore

Process simulation is a critical cornerstone of chemical engineering design. Current automated chemical design methodologies focus mainly on various representations of process flow diagrams. However, transforming these diagrams into executable simulation flowsheets remains a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor, requiring extensive manual parameter configuration within simulation software. In this work, we propose a novel multi-agent workflow that leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of large language models(LLMs) and enables iterative interactions with chemical process simulation software, achieving end-to-end automated simulation from textual process specifications to computationally validated software configurations for design enhancement. Our approach integrates four specialized agents responsible for task understanding, topology generation, parameter configuration, and evaluation analysis, respectively, coupled with Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search to accurately interpret semantics and robustly generate configurations. Evaluated on Simona, a large-scale process description dataset, our method achieves a 31. 3% improvement in the simulation convergence rate compared to state-of-the-art baselines and reduces the design time by 89. 0% compared to the expert manual design. This work demonstrates the potential of AI-assisted chemical process design, which bridges the gap between conceptual design and practical implementation. Our workflow is applicable to diverse process-oriented industries, including pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, food processing, and manufacturing, offering a generalizable solution for automated process design.

AAAI 2026

From Text to Simulation: A Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Automated Chemical Process Design

multiagent planning

agent communication

agent-based simulation and emergent behavior

The purpose of the International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications (SIMULTECH) is to bring together researchers and practitioners from various fields interested in the technological advances and application challenges in all fields of modeling and simulation. The specific topics listed under each of these tracks highlight the interest of this conference in aspects related to computing, including Conceptual Modeling, Agent Based Modeling and Simulation, Interoperability, Ontologies, Knowledge Based Decision Support, Petri Nets, Business Process Modeling and Simulation, amongst others. 
CONFERENCE AREAS 
1 . Simulation Tools and Platforms 
2 . Simulation Methodologies 
3 . Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation 
4 . Application Domains

SIMULTECH 2021

The purpose of the International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications (SIMULTECH) is to bring together researchers and practitioners from various fields interested in the technological advances and application challenges in all fields of modeling and simulation. 

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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.

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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.

Large language models (LLMs) typically operate in a question-answering paradigm, where the quality of the input prompt critically affects the response. Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) aims to overcome the cognitive biases of manually crafted prompts and explore a broader prompt design space. However, existing APO methods often suffer from rigid template structures and inefficient exploration in the prompt space. To this end, we propose a Multi-Agent Adaptive Reasoning with Socratic guidance framework (MARS) for APO. MARS consists of five complementary agents and formulates the optimization process as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), enabling adaptive prompt refinement through explicit state modeling and interactive feedback. Specifically, a Planner agent generates flexible optimization trajectories, a Teacher-Critic-Student triad engages in Socratic-style dialogue to iteratively optimize the prompt based on pseudo-gradient signals in the text space, and a Target agent executes the prompt in downstream tasks to provide performance feedback. MARS integrates reasoning, feedback, and state transition into a unified hidden-state evolution process, improving both the effectiveness and interpretability of optimization. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MARS outperforms existing APO methods in terms of optimization performance, search efficiency, and interpretability.

MARS: Multi-Agent Adaptive Reasoning with Socratic Guidance for Automated Prompt Optimization

Satellite-based radar retrieval methods are widely employed to fill coverage gaps in ground-based radar systems, especially in remote areas affected by terrain blockage and limited detection range. Existing methods predominantly rely on overly simplistic spatial-domain architectures constructed from a single data source, limiting their ability to accurately capture complex precipitation patterns and sharply defined meteorological boundaries.
To address these limitations, we propose WaveC2R, a novel wavelet-driven coarse-to-refined framework for radar retrieval. WaveC2R integrates complementary multi-source data and leverages frequency-domain decomposition to separately model low-frequency components for capturing precipitation patterns and high-frequency components for delineating sharply defined meteorological boundaries. Specifically, WaveC2R consists of two stages (i) Intensity-Boundary Decoupled Learning, which leverages wavelet decomposition and frequency-specific loss functions to separately optimize low-frequency intensity and high-frequency boundaries; and (ii) Detail-Enhanced Diffusion Refinement, which employs frequency-aware conditional priors and multi-source data to progressively enhance fine-scale precipitation structures while preserving coarse-scale meteorological consistency.
Experimental results on the publicly available SEVIR dataset demonstrate that WaveC2R achieves state-of-the-art performance in satellite-based radar retrieval, particularly excelling at preserving high-intensity precipitation features and sharply defined meteorological boundaries.

WaveC2R: Wavelet-Driven Coarse-to-Refined Hierarchical Learning for Radar Retrieval

A dexterous hand capable of generalizable grasping objects is fundamental for the development of general-purpose embodied AI. However, previous methods focus narrowly on low-level grasp stability metrics, neglecting affordance-aware positioning and human-like poses which are crucial for downstream manipulation. To address these limitations, we propose AfforDex, a novel framework with two-stage training that learns a universal grasping policy with an inherent understanding of both motion priors and object affordances. In the first stage, a trajectory imitator is pre-trained on a large corpus of human hand motions to instill a strong prior for natural movement. In the second stage, a residual module is trained to adapt these general human-like motions to specific object instances. This refinement is critically guided by two components: our Negative Affordance-aware Segmentation (NAA) module, which identifies functionally inappropriate contact regions, and a privileged teacher-student distillation process that ensures the final vision-based policy is highly successful. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AfforDex not only achieves universal dexterous grasping but also remains remarkably human-like in posture and functionally appropriate in contact location. As a result, AfforDex significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across seen objects, unseen instances, and even entirely novel categories.

Towards Affordance-Aware Robotic Dexterous Grasping with Human-like Priors

Restoring nighttime images affected by multiple adverse weather conditions is a practical yet under-explored research problem, as multiple weather degradations usually coexist in the real world alongside various lighting effects at night. This paper first explores the challenging multi-weather nighttime image restoration task, where various types of weather degradations are intertwined with flare effects. To support the research, we contribute the AllWeatherNight dataset, featuring large-scale nighttime images with diverse compositional degradations. By employing illumination-aware degradation generation, our dataset significantly enhances the realism of synthetic degradations in nighttime scenes, providing a more reliable benchmark for model training and evaluation. Additionally, we propose ClearNight, a unified nighttime image restoration framework, which effectively removes complex degradations in one go. Specifically, ClearNight extracts Retinex-based dual priors and explicitly guides the network to focus on uneven illumination regions and intrinsic texture contents respectively, thereby enhancing restoration effectiveness in nighttime scenarios. Moreover, to more effectively model the common and unique characteristics of multiple weather degradations, ClearNight performs weather-aware dynamic specificity and commonality collaboration that adaptively allocates optimal sub-networks associated with specific weather types. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the necessity of the AllWeatherNight dataset and the superior performance of ClearNight. Our dataset and code will be released.

Clear Nights Ahead: Towards Multi-Weather Nighttime Image Restoration

Recent advancements in diffusion-based generative priors have enabled visually plausible image compression at extremely low bit rates. However, existing approaches suffer from slow sampling processes and suboptimal bit allocation due to fragmented training paradigms. In this work, we propose Accelerate \textbf{Diff}usion-based Image Compression via \textbf{C}onsistency Prior \textbf{R}efinement (DiffCR), a novel compression framework for efficient and high-fidelity image reconstruction. At the heart of DiffCR is a Frequency-aware Skip Estimation (FaSE) module that refines the $\epsilon$-prediction prior from a pre-trained latent diffusion model and aligns it with compressed latents at different timesteps via Frequency Decoupling Attention (FDA). Furthermore, a lightweight consistency estimator enables fast two-step decoding by preserving the semantic trajectory of diffusion sampling. Without updating the backbone diffusion model, DiffCR achieves substantial bitrate savings (27.2\% BD-rate(LPIPS) and 65.1\% BD-rate(PSNR)) and over $10\times$ speed-up compared to SOTA diffusion-based compression baselines.

Towards Efficient Low-rate Image Compression with Frequency-aware Diffusion Prior Refinement

Multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) for remote sensing data has gained increasing attention due to its ability to integrate complementary information across modalities while capturing spatial dependencies in heterogeneous data. Although current methods based on graph contrastive learning achieve strong performance, they often misidentify intra-cluster samples as negatives, leading to class conflicts and reduced clustering accuracy. Graph masked autoencoders have recently shown promising potential in learning robust representations through masked reconstruction, but their application to remote sensing data remains underexplored. This challenge is especially notable in the multi-view remote sensing setting, where high heterogeneity and complex spatial structures increase the difficulty of effective representation learning. To address these issues, we propose Clustering-Guided graph Mask AutoEncoder (CG-MAE), the first framework to extend graph masked autoencoders to multi-view remote sensing clustering. We introduce a clustering-guided masking strategy that selectively masks nodes near cluster centers and intra-cluster edges, which are crucial for capturing key structural information. By reconstructing these masked components, the model is encouraged to focus on learning features that are highly relevant to clustering. To further improve training stability and efficiency, we design an easy-to-hard node masking strategy that enables the model to gradually learn from increasingly challenging patterns. Additionally, we propose a dual self-adaptive learning mechanism that encourages the model to align more closely with the underlying semantic distributions. Extensive experiments on four widely used multi-view remote sensing datasets demonstrate that CG-MAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both clustering accuracy and representation quality.

Graph Masked Autoencoder for Multi-view Remote Sensing Data Clustering

Text-driven motion generation has attracted increasing attention due to its broad applications in virtual reality, animation, and robotics. While existing methods typically model human and animal motion separately, a joint cross-species approach offers key advantages, such as a unified representation and improved generalization. However, morphological differences across species remain a key challenge, often compromising motion plausibility. To address this, we propose \textbf{X-MoGen}, the first unified framework for cross-species text-driven motion generation covering both humans and animals. X-MoGen adopts a two-stage architecture. First, a conditional graph variational autoencoder learns canonical T-pose priors, while an autoencoder encodes motion into a shared latent space regularized by morphological loss. In the second stage, we perform masked motion modeling to generate motion embeddings conditioned on textual descriptions. During training, a morphological consistency module is employed to promote skeletal plausibility across species. To support unified modeling, we construct \textbf{UniMo4D}, a large-scale dataset of 115 species and 119k motion sequences, which integrates human and animal motions under a shared skeletal topology for joint training. Extensive experiments on UniMo4D demonstrate that X-MoGen outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen species.

X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation Across Humans and Animals

The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zero-shot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose a parameter-efficient and weakly supervised self-training adaptation framework designed to enhance the robustness and accuracy of MDE foundation models in unseen diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that our method consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

Enhancing Generalization of Depth Estimation Foundation Model via Weakly-Supervised Adaptation with Regularization

Image composition aims to seamlessly integrate a foreground object into a background, where generating realistic and geometrically accurate shadows remains a persistent challenge. While recent diffusion-based methods have outperformed GAN-based approaches, existing techniques, such as the diffusion-based relighting framework IC-Light, still fall short in producing shadows with both high appearance realism and geometric precision, especially in composite images. To address these limitations, we propose a novel shadow generation framework based on a Keypoints Linear Model (KPLM) and a Shadow Triangle Algorithm (STA). KPLM models articulated human bodies using nine keypoints and one bounding block, enabling physically plausible shadow projection and dynamic shading across joints, thereby enhancing visual realism. STA further improves geometric accuracy by computing shadow angles, lengths, and spatial positions through explicit geometric formulations. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on shadow realism benchmarks, particularly under complex human poses, and generalizes effectively to multi-directional relighting scenarios such as those supported by IC-Light.

KPLM-STA: Physically-Accurate Shadow Synthesis for Human Relighting via Keypoint-Based Light Modeling

Inter-agent communication serves as an effective mechanism for enhancing performance in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems. However, the inherent communication latency in practical systems induces both action decision delays and outdated information sharing, impeding MARL performance gains, particularly in time-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a $\textbf{Value-of-Information aware Low-latency Communication (VIL2C)}$ scheme that proactively adjusts the latency distribution to mitigate its effects in MARL systems. Specifically, we define a Value of Information (VoI) metric to quantify the importance of delayed messages on the recipient agent's decision. We then design a VoI aware resource allocation method that dynamically prioritizes message transmission based on each delayed message's importance. Moreover, we propose a progressive message reception mechanism to adaptively adjust the reception duration based on received messages. We derive the optimized VoI aware resource allocation and theoretically prove the performance advantage of the proposed VIL2C scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIL2C outperforms existing approaches under various communication conditions. These gains are attributed to the low-latency transmission of high-VoI messages via resource allocation and the elimination of unnecessary waiting periods via adaptive reception duration.

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