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In recent years, with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks. However, reasoning inconsistencies in LLMs still significantly limit the performance of agents in complex decision-making scenarios. Cognitive science research suggests that individuals can benefit from observing others&#39; explicit thinking processes to improve their strategy-making. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose Reference-guided Reasoning with meta-cognition (RefRea), a novel approach that enhances decision-making by introducing a reference language model to guide and calibrate the reasoning model&#39;s actions. RefRea enhances reasoning accuracy and stability by integrating a reference model and a meta-cognition module. The reference model relies solely on validated meta-cognition for consistent guidance, while the reasoning model interacts with the environment using both validated and exploratory meta-cognition. Guidance is provided by comparing the action similarity between the reference and reasoning models. This process is supported by the meta-cognition module, which generates summary knowledge by reflecting on action history and environmental feedback, leading to more adaptive and reliable behavior. We evaluate our algorithm in the text-based reasoning environment ScienceWorld. Experimental results demonstrate that RefRea outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of both the reference model and the meta-cognition module.

AAAI 2026

RefRea: Reference-Guided Reasoning with Meta-Cognition for Accurate Language Model Agents

In recent years, with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks. However, reasoning inconsistencies in LLMs still significantly limit the performance of agents in complex decision-making scenarios. Cognitive science research suggests that individuals can benefit from observing others' explicit thinking processes to improve their strategy-making. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose Reference-guided Reasoning with meta-cognition (RefRea), a novel approach that enhances decision-making by introducing a reference language model to guide and calibrate the reasoning model's actions. RefRea enhances reasoning accuracy and stability by integrating a reference model and a meta-cognition module. The reference model relies solely on validated meta-cognition for consistent guidance, while the reasoning model interacts with the environment using both validated and exploratory meta-cognition. Guidance is provided by comparing the action similarity between the reference and reasoning models. This process is supported by the meta-cognition module, which generates summary knowledge by reflecting on action history and environmental feedback, leading to more adaptive and reliable behavior. We evaluate our algorithm in the text-based reasoning environment ScienceWorld. Experimental results demonstrate that RefRea outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of both the reference model and the meta-cognition module.

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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.

Achieving zero-shot adversarial robustness without sacrificing generalization remains challenging for foundation models such as CLIP, especially under large adversarial perturbations. Through empirical analyses, we identify three critical yet overlooked issues: (1) Logit margins exhibit a stable offset between small and large adversarial perturbations, suggesting that explicitly adjusting margins could improve robustness against unseen large perturbations. (2) A significant negative correlation exists between logit margin and inter-class semantic similarity, indicating that semantic structures are insufficiently leveraged by existing methods. (3) Existing methods for adjusting text embeddings disrupt the intrinsic semantic consistency established by pre-trained models, undermining generalization capability. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Text-Image Mutual Awareness (TIMA) framework, including a Text-Aware Image (TAI) tuning module with an Adaptive Semantic-Aware Margin (ASAM) to explicitly calibrate logit margins, and an Image-Aware Text (IAT) tuning module with Semantic Consistent Minimum Hyperspherical Energy (SC-MHE) to preserve semantic consistency. Comprehensive experiments validate that TIMA significantly outperforms existing approaches by effectively addressing the identified limitations.

TIMA: Text-Image Mutual Awareness for Balancing Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness and Generalization Ability

Continual forgetting task aims to continuously remove multiple target knowledge subsets from pre-trained models while maintaining the integrity of remaining knowledge. Existing methods suffer from both incomplete forgetting of target knowledge and unintended forgetting of indistinguishable remaining knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the forgetting knowledge localization and isolation for continual forgetting in pre-trained vision models which precisely forgets target knowledge while reducing over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. To achieve precise forgetting, we first propose the forgetting knowledge layer localization to explore layers in the model which are more related to forgetting knowledge. Then, we design the forgetting knowledge parameter isolation to isolate the parameters sensitive to forgetting knowledge in these selected layers, mitigating over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. Finally, we fine-tune these isolated parameters and freeze the remaining parameters to achieve efficient forgetting while maintaining high performance on retained datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across multiple continual forgetting tasks. We will release the source codes and pre-trained models.

Forgetting Knowledge Localization and Isolation for Continual Forgetting of Pre-trained Vision Models

Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs face significant obstacles due to their massive parameter scale, which imposes memory, storage, and deployment challenges. Although recent expert merging methods aim to achieve greater efficiency by consolidating several experts, they are fundamentally hindered by parameter conflicts arising from expert specialization. In this paper, we present Sub-MoE, a novel MoE compression framework via Subspace Expert Merging. Our key insight is to perform joint Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on concatenated expert weights, reducing conflicting parameters by extracting shared $U$-matrices while enabling effective merging of the expert-specific $V$ components. Specifically, Sub-MoE consists of two innovative stages: (1) Adaptive Expert Clustering, which groups functionally coherent experts via K-means clustering based on cosine similarity of expert outputs; and (2) Subspace Expert Merging, which first performs Experts Union Decomposition to derive the shared $U$-matrix across experts in the same group, then applies frequency-based merging for individual $V$-matrices, and completes expert reconstruction using the merged $V$-matrix. In this way, we align and fuse experts in a shared subspace. Additionally, the framework can be extended with intra-expert compression for further inference optimization. Extensive experiments on Mixtral, DeepSeek, and Qwen-1.5/3 MoE LLMs demonstrate that our Sub-MoE significantly outperforms existing expert pruning and merging methods. Notably, our Sub-MoE maintains 96\%/86\% of original performance with 25\%/50\% expert reduction on Mixtral-8×7B in zero-shot benchmarks. Code is available in the supplementary materials.

Sub-MoE: Efficient Mixture-of-Expert LLMs Compression via Subspace Expert Merging

Real-world dark images commonly exhibit not only low visibility and contrast but also complex noise and blur, posing significant restoration challenges. Existing methods often rely on paired data or fail to model dynamic illumination and blur characteristics, leading to poor generalization. To tackle this, we propose a generative framework based on visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling, guided by perceptual priors from the vision-language model (VLM). Specifically, to supply informative conditioning cues for VAR models, we deploy an adaptive curve estimation scheme to modulate the diverse illumination based on VLM-derived visibility scores.
In addition, we integrate dynamic and spatial-frequency-aware Rotary Positional Encodings (SF-RoPE) into VAR to enhance its ability to model structures degraded by blur. Furthermore, we propose a recursive phase-domain modulation strategy that mitigates blur-induced artifacts in the phase domain via bounded iterative refinement guided by VLM-assessed blur scores. Our framework is fully unsupervised and achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets and downstream detection tasks in dark conditions. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Zero-Reference Joint Low-Light Enhancement and Deblurring via Visual Autoregressive Modeling with VLM-Derived Modulation

Multi-modal entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entities between two multi-modal Knowledge graphs by integrating multi-modal data, such as images and text, to enrich the semantic representations of entities. However, existing methods often overlook the structural contextual information within each modality, making them vulnerable to interference from shallow features. To address these challenges, we propose MyGram, a modality-aware graph transformer with global distribution for multi-modal entity alignment. Specifically, we develop a modality diffusion learning module to capture deep structural contextual information within modalities and enable fine-grained multi-modal fusion. In addition, we introduce a Gram Loss that acts as a regularization constraint by minimizing the volume of a 4-dimensional parallelotope formed by multi-modal features, thereby achieving global distribution consistency across modalities. We conduct experiments on five public datasets. Results show that MyGram outperforms baseline models, achieving a 4.05% improvement in Hits@1 on FBDB15K, 10.25% improvement on FBYG15K, and a 3.75% improvement on DBP15K.

MyGram: Modality-aware Graph Transformer with Global Distribution for Multi-modal Entity Alignment

Leveraging the event-driven paradigm, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising approach for constructing energy-efficient Transformer architectures. Compared to directly trained Spiking Transformers, ANN-to-SNN conversion methods bypass the high training costs. However, existing methods still suffer from notable limitations, failing to effectively handle nonlinear operations in Transformer architectures and requiring additional fine-tuning processes for pre-trained ANNs. To address these issues, we propose a high-performance and training-free ANN-to-SNN conversion framework tailored for Transformer architectures. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-basis Exponential Decay (MBE) neuron, which employs an exponential decay strategy and multi-basis encoding method to efficiently approximate various nonlinear operations. It removes the requirement for weight modifications in pre-trained ANNs. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (CV, NLU, NLG) and mainstream Transformer architectures (ViT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrate that our method achieves near-lossless conversion accuracy with significantly lower latency. This provides a promising pathway for the efficient and scalable deployment of Spiking Transformers in real-world applications.

Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Transformers

The KV cache in self-attention has emerged as a major bottleneck in long-context and large-batch inference for LLMs. Existing approaches often treat sparsity prediction and compression as separate modules—relying on auxiliary index structures to select relevant tokens, and on complex quantization schemes to reduce memory usage. This fragmented design introduces redundant overhead and limits scalability.

In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm: treating the compressed key representation not merely as storage, but as a self-indexing structure that directly enables efficient sparse attention. By designing a sign-based 1-bit vector quantization (VQ) scheme, our method unifies compression and retrieval in a single, hardware-friendly format. This approach eliminates the need for external indices or learning-based predictors, offering a lightweight yet robust solution for memory-constrained inference. 

All components are designed to be hardware-efficient and easy to implement. By implementing custom CUDA kernels, our method integrates seamlessly with FlashAttention, minimizing additional runtime and memory overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach delivers both effectiveness and efficiency.

Self-Indexing KVCache: Predicting Sparse Attention from Compressed Keys

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to dynamically explore complex 3D environments following human instructions. Recent research underscores the potential of harnessing large language models (LLMs) for VLN, given their commonsense knowledge and general reasoning capabilities. Despite their strengths, a substantial gap in task completion performance persists between LLM-based approaches and domain experts, as LLMs inherently struggle to comprehend real-world spatial correlations precisely; additionally, LLM inference can make the decision-making process considerably inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-process thinking framework dubbed $R^3$, integrating LLMs’ generalization capabilities with VLN-specific expertise in a zero-shot manner. The framework comprises three core modules: Runner, Ruminator, and Regulator. The Runner is a lightweight transformer-based expert model that ensures efficient and accurate navigation under regular circumstances. The Ruminator employs a multimodal LLM as the backbone and adopts chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to elicit structured reasoning from the LLM. The Regulator monitors the navigation progress and controls the appropriate thinking mode according to three criteria, integrating Runner and Ruminator harmoniously. Experimental results illustrate that R$^3$ significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, exceeding 3.28% and 3.30% in SPL and RGSPL respectively on the REVERIE benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in handling challenging VLN tasks.

Run, Ruminate, and Regulate: A Dual-process Thinking System for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Generating high-quality human interactions holds significant value for applications like virtual reality and robotics.
However, existing methods often fail to preserve unique individual characteristics or fully adhere to textual descriptions. 
To address these challenges, we introduce InterMoE, a novel framework built on a Dynamic Temporal-Selective Mixture of Experts. 
The core of InterMoE is a routing mechanism that synergistically uses both high-level text semantics and low-level motion context to dispatch temporal motion features to specialized experts. 
This allows experts to dynamically determine the selection capacity and focus on critical temporal features, thereby preserving specific individual characteristic identities while ensuring high semantic fidelity.
Extensive experiments show that InterMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance in individual-specific high-fidelity 3D human interaction generation, reducing FID scores by 9\% on the InterHuman dataset and 22\% on InterX.

InterMoE: Individual-Specific 3D Human Interaction Generation via Dynamic Temporal-Selective MoE

Recovering precise surface geometry from corrupted point clouds remains a core challenge in 3D vision. Although existing denoising techniques achieve remarkable success, balancing noise removal with preserving intricate geometric details continues to pose difficulties. A critical limitation of current methods is that their adaptive feature aggregation mechanisms rely heavily on intermediate network features that have not been explicitly regularized, resulting in unstable guidance signals. This instability restricts the capability of the network to optimally differentiate true geometric details from noise.
To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel deep learning framework that explicitly learns structured representations as robust priors to guide feature refinement. Our approach first derives a set of representative local structural primitives from input features by means of a learned codebook. This learned structured representation then serves as a robust conditional signal, directing a subsequent feature fusion mechanism to dynamically aggregate information in a structure-aware manner, thereby more effectively discerning noise and meticulously reconstructing geometric details. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks have demonstrated the superiority of our framework over existing advanced techniques in terms of detail preservation and noise suppression.

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