Singapore

Applying large pre-trained Vision-Language Models to recommendation is a burgeoning field, a direction we term Vision-Language-Recommendation (VLR). 
Bringing VLR to user-oriented on-device intelligence within a federated learning framework is a crucial step for enhancing user privacy and delivering personalized experiences.
This paper introduces FedVLR, a federated VLR framework specially designed for user-specific personalized fusion of vision-language representations.
At its core is a novel bi-level fusion mechanism:
The server-side multi-view fusion module first generates a diverse set of pre-fused multimodal views. 
Subsequently, each client employs a user-specific mixture-of-expert mechanism to adaptively integrate these views based on individual user interaction history.
This designed lightweight personalized fusion module provides an efficient solution to implement a federated VLR system. 
The effectiveness of our proposed FedVLR has been validated on seven benchmark datasets.

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

Federated Vision-Language-Recommendation with Personalized Fusion

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.

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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 Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models by integrating visual inputs, thereby enabling advanced multimodal reasoning across diverse applications. However, these enhanced reasoning capabilities introduce new security risks, particularly to jailbreaking attacks that bypass built-in safety mechanisms to elicit harmful or unauthorized outputs. While recent efforts have explored adversarial and typographic prompts, most existing attacks suffer from three key limitations: reliance on auxiliary models, limited effectiveness in black-box scenarios, and inadequate exploitation of the LVLMs' intrinsic reasoning abilities. In this work, we propose TVChain, a novel black-box jailbreaking framework that explicitly intervenes in both the visual and textual reasoning processes of LVLMs. TVChain decomposes malicious prompts into a sequence of semantically meaningful sub-images that represent relevant objects and behaviors, thereby circumventing direct exposure of illicit content. In parallel, a carefully designed chain-of-thought (CoT) textual prompt is employed to steer the model's reasoning toward reconstructing the intended activity in a covert yet effective manner. We demonstrate that this compositional prompting strategy reduces the likelihood of triggering safety mechanisms while preserving attack efficacy. Extensive evaluations on eleven LVLMs (seven open-source and four commercial) across two benchmark datasets and three state-of-the-art defenses validate the effectiveness and robustness of TVChain.

TVChain: Leveraging Textual-Visual Prompt Chains for Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models

In Social Deduction Games (SDGs) such as Avalon, Mafia, and Werewolf, players conceal their identities and deliberately mislead others, making hidden-role inference a central and demanding task. Accurate role identification, which forms the basis of an agent's belief state, is therefore the keystone for both human and AI performance. We introduce CSP4SDG, a probabilistic, constraint–satisfaction framework that analyses gameplay objectively. Game events and dialogue are mapped to four linguistically agnostic constraint classes—evidence, phenomena, assertions, and hypotheses. Hard constraints prune impossible role assignments, while weighted soft constraints score the remainder; information-gain weighting links each hypothesis to its expected value under entropy reduction, and a simple closed-form scoring rule guarantees that truthful assertions converge to classical hard logic with minimum error. The resulting posterior over roles is fully interpretable and updates in real time. Experiments on three public datasets show that CSP4SDG (i) outperforms LLM-based baselines in every inference scenario, and (ii) boosts LLMs when supplied as an auxiliary "reasoning tool." Our study validates that principled probabilistic reasoning with information theory is a scalable alternative—or complement—to heavy-weight neural models for SDGs.

CSP4SDG: Constraint and Information-Theory Based Role Identification in Social Deduction Games with LLM-Enhanced Inference

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLM-based KGR methods still face two critical limitations. First, existing methods often extract reasoning paths indiscriminately, without assessing their different importance, which may introduce irrelevant noise that misleads LLMs. Second, while many methods leverage LLMs to dynamically explore potential reasoning paths, they require high retrieval demands and frequent LLM calls. To address these limitations, we propose PathMind, a novel framework designed to enhance faithful and interpretable reasoning by selectively guiding LLMs with important reasoning paths. Specifically, PathMind follows a "Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason" paradigm. First, it retrieves a query subgraph from KG through the retrieval module. Next, it introduces a path prioritization mechanism that identifies important reasoning paths using a semantic-aware path priority function, which simultaneously considers the accumulative cost and the estimated future cost for reaching the target. Finally, PathMind generates accurate and logically consistent responses via a dual-phase training strategy, including task-specific instruction tuning and path-wise preference alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PathMind consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on complex reasoning tasks with fewer input tokens, by identifying essential reasoning paths.

PathMind: A Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

Video-based human pose estimation has long been a nontrivial task due to its dynamic nature and challenging detection scenarios such as occlusion and defocus. Inspired by the success of diffusion models, researchers have applied them to video pose estimation, outperforming traditional joint detection methods. However, existing diffusion model-based methods still face challenges like slow convergence and unstable pose generation. To tackle these issues, we propose DiffusionPose, a novel framework for video pose estimation that integrates diffusion models with optimization strategies: (1) We combine the emerging Mamba with Transformers to balance global and local spatio-temporal modeling. (2)We integrate Markov Random Fields into the reverse diffusion process to enhance the denoising of pose heatmaps, particularly addressing the issue of confused generation of occluded joints. (3) We mathematically formulate a Markov objective to supervise the heatmap denoising process, enabling the model to generate anatomically plausible skeletons. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. Interestingly, it shows surprising robustness in challenging video scenarios, improving the accuracy of the most difficult ankle joint by 16.9\% compared to the previous best diffusion model-based method on the Challenging-PoseTrack dataset.

DiffusionPose: Markov-Optimized Diffusion Model for Human Pose Estimation

Fairness in multi-agent systems (MAS) focuses on equitable reward distribution among agents in scenarios involving sensitive attributes such as race, gender, or socioeconomic status. This paper introduces fairness in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a penalty term derived from a fairness definition such as demographic parity, counterfactual fairness, or conditional statistical parity. 
The proposed method, which we call Fair-PPO, balances reward maximisation with fairness by integrating two penalty components: a retrospective component that minimises disparities in past outcomes and a prospective component that ensures fairness in future decision-making.
We evaluate our approach in two games: the Allelopathic Harvest, a cooperative and competitive MAS focused on resource collection, where some agents possess a sensitive attribute, and HospitalSim, a hospital simulation, in which agents coordinate the operations of hospital patients with different mobility and priority needs. Experiments show that Fair-PPO achieves fairer policies than PPO across the fairness metrics and, through the retrospective and prospective penalty components, reveals a wide spectrum of strategies to improve fairness; at the same time, its performance pairs with that of state-of-the-art fair reinforcement-learning algorithms. Fairness comes at the cost of reduced efficiency, but does not compromise equality among the overall population (Gini index). These findings underscore the potential of Fair-PPO to address fairness challenges in MAS.

Fairness Aware Reinforcement Learning via Proximal Policy Optimization

Alpha factor mining is pivotal in quantitative investment for identifying predictive signals from complex financial data. While traditional formulaic alpha mining relies on human expertise, contemporary automated methods, such as those based on genetic programming or reinforcement learning, often struggle with search inefficiency or yield alpha factors that are difficult to interpret. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages the LLM's instruction-following and reasoning capability to iteratively generate and refine symbolic alpha formulas within an MCTS-driven exploration. A key innovation is the guidance of MCTS exploration by rich, quantitative feedback from financial backtesting of each candidate factor, enabling efficient navigation of the vast search space. Furthermore, a frequent subtree avoidance mechanism is introduced to enhance search diversity and prevent formulaic homogenization, further improving performance. Experimental results on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our LLM-based framework outperforms existing methods by mining alphas with superior predictive accuracy and trading performance. The resulting formulas are also more amenable to human interpretation, establishing a more effective and efficient paradigm for formulaic alpha mining.

Navigating the Alpha Jungle: An LLM-Powered MCTS Framework for Formulaic Alpha Factor Mining

Collaborative perception enables connected vehicles to share information, overcoming occlusions and extending the limited sensing range inherent in single-agent (non-collaborative) systems. Existing vision-only methods for 3D semantic occupancy prediction commonly rely on dense 3D voxels, which incur high communication costs, or 2D planar features, which require accurate depth estimation or additional supervision, limiting their applicability to collaborative scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the first approach leveraging sparse 3D semantic Gaussians for collaborative 3D semantic occupancy prediction. By sharing and fusing intermediate Gaussian primitives, our method provides three benefits: a neighborhood-based cross-agent fusion that removes duplicates and suppresses noisy or inconsistent Gaussians; a joint encoding of geometry and semantics in each primitive, which reduces reliance on depth supervision and allows simple rigid alignment; and sparse, object-centric messages that preserve structural information while reducing communication volume. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms single-agent perception and baseline collaborative methods by +8.42 and +3.28 points in mIoU, and +5.11 and +22.41 points in IoU, respectively. When further reducing the number of transmitted Gaussians, our method still achieves a +1.9 improvement in mIoU, using only 34.6% communication volume, highlighting robust performance under limited communication budgets.

Vision-Only Gaussian Splatting for Collaborative Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Multimodal Model Editing (MMED) aims to correct erroneous knowledge in multimodal models. Existing evaluation methods, adapted from textual model editing, focus on fact recall and prediction preservation for unrelated inputs to assess locality. However, these typically rely on low-similarity or random input pairs, which can overstate editing success and obscure overfitting effects. To address this limitation, we propose a comprehensive locality evaluation framework for MMED, spanning three key dimensions: **random-image locality, no-image locality,** and **consistent-image locality**. These dimensions are operationalized through seven distinct data types, enabling a detailed and structured analysis of multimodal edits. In addition, we introduce **dynamic evaluation for visual question answering (De-VQA)**, which dynamically selects data samples based on the specific edits applied. This exposes limitations in existing locality metrics. Using De-VQA, we uncover a phenomenon we term **transient blindness**, a form of overfitting where edited models overly rely on textual input similar to the edit, while disregarding relevant visual information. We analyze this effect by quantifying cross-modal token contributions, revealing that edits tend to disproportionately affect textual tokens, resulting in excessive dependence on language. To mitigate this problem, we propose locality-aware adversarial losses that encourage a more balanced integration of textual and visual representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, reducing transient blindness and improving locality preservation by an average of 17\% across multiple models and datasets.

Uncovering and Mitigating Transient Blindness in Multimodal Model Editing

Rectified Flow (RF) has been widely used as an effective generative model. Although RF is primarily based on probability flow Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), recent studies have shown that injecting noise through reverse-time Stochastic Differential Equations (SDE) for sampling can achieve superior generative performance. Inspired by Positive-incentive Noise ($\pi$-noise), we propose an innovative generative algorithm to train $\pi$-noise generators, namely Rectified Noise ($\Delta$RN), which improves the generative performance by injecting $\pi$-noise into the velocity field of pre-trained RF models. After introducing the Rectified Noise pipeline, pre-trained RF models can be efficiently transformed into $\pi$-noise generators. We validate Rectified Noise by conducting extensive experiments across various model architectures on different datasets. Notably, we find that: (1) RF models using Rectified Noise reduce FID from10.16 to 9.05 on ImageNet-1k. (2) The models of $\pi$-noise generators achieve improved performance with only 0.39\% additional training parameters.

Rectified Noise: A Generative Model Using Positive-incentive Noise

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuation functions to achieve both fairness and efficiency under the constraint that each agent receives exactly the same number of goods (the balanced constraint). While this constraint is common in real-world scenarios such as team drafts or asset division, it significantly complicates the search for allocations that are both fair and efficient. Envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) is a well-established fairness notion for indivisible goods. Pareto optimality (PO) and its stronger variant, fractional Pareto optimality (fPO), are widely accepted efficiency criteria. Our main contribution establishes both the existence and polynomial-time computability of allocations that are simultaneously EF1 and fPO under balanced constraints in two fundamental cases: (1) when agents have at most two distinct types of valuation functions, and (2) when each agent has a personalized bivalued valuation. Our algorithms leverage novel applications of maximum-weight matching in bipartite graphs and duality theory, providing the first polynomial-time solutions for these cases and offering new insights for constrained fair division problems.

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TVChain: Leveraging Textual-Visual Prompt Chains for Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models

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