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Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a $\Delta$-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the &quot;critical details that determine answer divergence.&quot; This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6\% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15\% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from &quot;post-hoc context cleaning&quot; to &quot;a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning,&quot; offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments.

AAAI 2026

RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability

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Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a $\Delta$-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the "critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6\% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15\% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from "post-hoc context cleaning" to "a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning," offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments.

technical paper

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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.

Autonomous execution of long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks traditionally requires extensive real-world data and expert engineering, posing significant cost and scalability challenges. This paper proposes a novel framework integrating hierarchical semantic decomposition, reinforcement learning (RL), visual language models (VLMs), and knowledge distillation to overcome these limitations. Complex tasks are decomposed into atomic skills, with RL-trained policies for each primitive exclusively in simulation. Crucially, our RL formulation incorporates explicit force constraints to prevent object damage during delicate interactions. VLMs perform high-level task decomposition and skill planning, generating diverse expert demonstrations. These are distilled into a unified policy via Visual-Tactile Diffusion Policy for end-to-end execution. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies exploring different VLM-based task planners to identify optimal demonstration generation pipelines, and systematically compare imitation learning algorithms for skill distillation. Extensive simulation experiments and physical deployment validate that our approach achieves policy learning for long-horizon manipulation without costly human demonstrations, while the VLM-guided atomic skill framework enables scalable generalization to diverse tasks.

Gentle Manipulation Policy Learning via Demonstrations from VLM Planned Atomic Skills

Learning path recommendation seeks to provide learners with a structured sequence of learning items (e.g., knowledge concepts or exercises) to optimize their learning efficiency. Despite significant efforts in this area, most existing methods primarily rely on prerequisite relationships, which present two major limitations: 1) Requiring prerequisite relationships between knowledge concepts, which are difficult to obtain due to the cost of expert annotation, hindering the application of current learning path recommendation methods. 2) Relying on a single, sequentially dependent knowledge structure based on prerequisite relationships implies that difficulties at any stage can cause learning blockages, which in turn disrupt subsequent learning processes. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, GraphRAG-Induced Dual Knowledge Structure Graphs for Personalized Learning Path Recommendation (KnowLP), which enhances learning path recommendations by incorporating both prerequisite and similarity relationships between knowledge concepts. Specifically, we introduce a knowledge concept structure graph generation module EDU-GraphRAG that adaptively constructs knowledge concept structure graphs for different educational datasets, significantly improving the generalizability of learning path recommendation methods. We then propose a Discrimination Learning-driven Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) module, which mitigates the issue of blocked learning paths, further enhancing the efficacy of learning path recommendations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also provides interpretable reasoning for the recommended learning paths. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KnowLP.

GraphRAG-Induced Dual Knowledge Structure Graphs for Personalized Learning Path Recommendation

Session-based recommendation aims to predict users’ next actions by modeling their ongoing interaction sequences, particularly in scenarios where long-term user profiles are unavailable. While existing methods have achieved promising results by leveraging sequential and graph-based structures, they often rely on global aggregation strategies that emphasize dominant user interests while overlooking the transient and fine-grained behavior patterns embedded in sessions. In practice, user intent evolves across sessions and is reflected through diverse behavioral patterns, ranging from immediate preferences to segmented co-occurrence interests and long-range goals. To address these limitations, we propose **GraphFine**, a novel multi-granular graph learning framework that achieves fine-grained behavioral pattern awareness for session-based recommendation. Our approach models user behavior at different temporal and semantic granularities through a combination of graph and hypergraph neural networks. Specifically, we employ a position-aware graph to capture short-term item transitions, and construct segmented co-occurrence hypergraphs to uncover high-order semantic relations among co-occurred items. To preserve diverse user intents, we further introduce a multi-view intent readout mechanism that extracts and adaptively integrates intent signals from short-term actions, segmented co-occurrence patterns, and entire sessions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that **GraphFine** consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, confirming its effectiveness in capturing fine-grained and dynamic user preferences for more accurate recommendation.

Multi-Granular Graph Learning with Fine-Grained Behavioral Pattern Awareness for Session-Based Recommendation

Federated Domain Generalization (FDG) aims to collaboratively train a global model across distributed clients that can generalize well on unseen domains. However, existing FDG methods typically struggle with cross-client data heterogeneity and incur significant communication and computation overhead. To address these challenges, this paper presents a new FDG framework, dubbed FaST-PT, which facilitates local feature augmentation and efficient unseen domain adaptation in a distributed manner. First, we propose a lightweight Multi-Modal Style Transfer (MST) method to transform image embedding under text supervision, which could expand the training data distribution and mitigate domain shift. We then design a dual-prompt module that decomposes the prompt into global and domain prompts. Specifically, global prompts capture general knowledge from augmented embedding across clients, while domain prompts capture domain-specific knowledge from local data. Besides, Domain-aware Prompt Generation (DPG) is introduced to adaptively generate suitable prompts for each sample, which facilitates unseen domain adaptation through knowledge fusion. Extensive experiments on four cross-domain benchmark datasets, e.g., PACS and DomainNet, demonstrate the superior performance of FaST-PT over SOTA FDG methods such as FedDG-GA and DiPrompt. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and efficiency of FaST-PT.

Multi-Modal Style Transfer-based Prompt Tuning for Efficient Federated Domain Generalization

We present FoundationSLAM, a learning-based monocular dense SLAM system that addresses the absence of geometric consistency in previous flow-based approaches for accurate and robust tracking and mapping.
Our core idea is to bridge flow estimation with geometric reasoning by leveraging the guidance from foundation depth models. 
To this end, we first develop a Hybrid Flow Network that produces geometry-aware correspondences, enabling consistent depth and pose inference across diverse keyframes. 
To enforce global consistency, we propose a Bi-Consistent Bundle Adjustment Layer that jointly optimizes keyframe pose and depth under multi-view constraints. Furthermore, we introduce a Reliability-Aware Refinement mechanism that dynamically adapts the flow update process by distinguishing between reliable and uncertain regions, forming a closed feedback loop between matching and optimization.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoundationSLAM achieves superior trajectory accuracy and dense reconstruction quality across multiple challenging datasets, while running in real-time at 18 FPS, demonstrating strong generalization to various scenarios and practical applicability of our method.

FoundationSLAM: Unleashing the Power of Depth Foundation Models for End-to-End Dense Visual SLAM

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted for Protein Representation Learning (PRL), as residue interaction networks can be naturally represented as graphs. Current GNN-based PRL methods typically rely on single-perspective graph construction strategies, which capture partial properties of residue interactions, resulting in incomplete protein representations. To address this limitation, we propose M$^\text{2}$PG, a framework that constructs protein graphs from multiple perspectives and adaptively fuses them via Mixture of Experts (MoE) for PRL. M$^\text{2}$PG constructs graphs from physical, chemical, and geometric perspectives to characterize different properties of residue interactions. To capture both perspective-specific features and their synergies, we develop an MoE module, which dynamically routes perspectives to specialized experts, where experts learn intrinsic features and cross-perspective interactions. We quantitatively verify that MoE automatically specializes experts in modeling distinct levels of interaction—from individual representations, to pairwise inter-perspective synergies, and ultimately to a global consensus across all perspectives. Through integrating this multi-level information, M$^\text{2}$PG produces superior protein representations and achieves advanced performance on four different downstream protein tasks.

MMPG: MoE-based Adaptive Multi-Perspective Graph Fusion for Protein Representation Learning

3D multi-object tracking is a critical and challenging task in the field of autonomous driving. A common paradigm relies on modeling individual object motion, e.g., Kalman filters, to predict trajectories. While effective in simple scenarios, this approach often struggles in crowded environments or with inaccurate detections, as it overlooks the rich geometric relationships between objects. This highlights the need to leverage spatial cues. However, existing geometry-aware methods can be susceptible to interference from irrelevant objects, leading to ambiguous features and incorrect associations. To address this, we propose focusing on cue-consistency: identifying and matching stable spatial patterns over time. We introduce the Dynamic Scene Cue-Consistency Tracker (DSC-Track) to implement this principle. Firstly, we design a unified spatiotemporal encoder using Point Pair Features (PPF) to learn discriminative trajectory embeddings while suppressing interference. Secondly, our cue-consistency transformer module explicitly aligns consistent feature representations between historical tracks and current detections. Finally, a dynamic update mechanism preserves salient spatiotemporal information for stable online tracking. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo Open Datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. On the nuScenes benchmark, for instance, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 73.2\% and 70.3\% AMOTA on the validation and test sets, respectively.

Delving into Dynamic Scene Cue-Consistency for Robust 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Video large language models have achieved remarkable performance in tasks such as video question answering, however, their temporal understanding remains suboptimal. To address this limitation, we curate a dedicated instruction fine-tuning dataset that focuses on enhancing temporal comprehension across five key dimensions. In order to reduce reliance on costly temporal annotations, we introduce a multi-task prompt fine-tuning approach that seamlessly integrates temporal-sensitive tasks into existing instruction datasets without requiring additional annotations. Furthermore, we develop a novel benchmark for temporal-sensitive video understanding that not only fills the gaps in dimension coverage left by existing benchmarks but also rigorously filters out potential shortcuts, ensuring a more accurate evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the temporal understanding of video-LLMs while avoiding reliance on shortcuts.

TIME: Temporal-Sensitive Multi-Dimensional Instruction Tuning and Robust Benchmarking for Video-LLMs

Bimanual dexterous manipulation is a critical yet underexplored area in robotics. Its high-dimensional action space and inherent task complexity present significant challenges for policy learning, and the limited task diversity in existing benchmarks hinders general-purpose skill development. Existing approaches largely depend on reinforcement learning, often constrained by intricately designed reward functions tailored to a narrow set of tasks. In this work, we present a novel approach for efficiently learning diverse bimanual dexterous skills from abundant human demonstrations. Specifically, we introduce BiDexHD, a framework that unifies task construction from existing bimanual datasets and employs teacher-student policy learning to address all tasks. The teacher learns state-based policies using a general two-stage reward function across tasks with shared behaviors, while the student distills the learned multi-task policies into a vision-based policy. With BiDexHD, scalable learning of numerous bimanual dexterous skills from auto-constructed tasks becomes feasible, offering promising advances toward universal bimanual dexterous manipulation. Experiments on TACO tool-using dataset spanning 141 tasks across 6 categories demonstrate a task fulfillment rate of 74.59% on trained tasks and 51.07% on unseen tasks. We further transfer BiDexHD to 11 ARCTIC collaborative tasks and achieve an average of 80.49% task fulfillment rate on trained tasks and 65.99% on unseen task. All empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive zero-shot generalization capabilities of BiDexHD.

Learning Diverse Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Human Demonstrations

Large Audio-language Models (LAMs) have recently enabled powerful speech-based interactions by coupling audio encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the security of LAMs under adversarial attacks remains underexplored, especially through audio jailbreaks that craft malicious audio prompts to bypass alignment. Existing efforts primarily rely on converting text-based attacks into speech or applying shallow signal-level perturbations, overlooking the impact of human speech’s expressive variations on LAM alignment robustness. To address this gap, we propose StyleBreak, a novel style-aware audio jailbreak framework that systematically investigates how diverse human speech attributes affect LAM alignment robustness. Specifically, StyleBreak employs a two-stage style-aware transformation pipeline that perturbs both textual content and audio to control linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic attributes. Furthermore, we develop a query-adaptive policy network that automatically searches for adversarial styles to enhance the efficiency of LAM jailbreak exploration. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LAMs exhibit critical vulnerabilities when exposed to diverse human speech attributes. Moreover, StyleBreak achieves substantial improvements in attack effectiveness and efficiency across multiple attack paradigms, highlighting the urgent need for more robust alignment in LAMs.

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Gentle Manipulation Policy Learning via Demonstrations from VLM Planned Atomic Skills

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Gentle Manipulation Policy Learning via Demonstrations from VLM Planned Atomic Skills

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Open-RAG: Enhanced Retrieval Augmented Reasoning with Open-Source Large Language Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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