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The integration of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant success in structured, problem-oriented tasks. However, applying these methods to open-ended dialogues, such as those in psychological counseling, presents unique challenges. Unlike tasks with objective correctness, success in therapeutic conversations depends on subjective factors like empathetic engagement, ethical adherence, and alignment with human preferences, for which strict correctness criteria are ill-defined. Existing result-oriented MCTS approaches can therefore produce misaligned responses. To address this, we introduce MCTSr-Zero, an MCTS framework designed for open-ended, human-centric dialogues. Its core innovation is domain alignment, which shifts the MCTS search objective from predefined end-states towards conversational trajectories that conform to target domain principles (e.g., empathy in counseling). Furthermore, MCTSr-Zero incorporates Regeneration and Meta-Prompt Adaptation mechanisms to substantially broaden exploration by allowing the MCTS to consider fundamentally different initial dialogue strategies. We evaluate MCTSr-Zero in psychological counseling by generating multi-turn dialogue data, which is used to fine-tune an LLM, PsyLLM. We also introduce PsyEval, a benchmark for assessing multi-turn psychological counseling dialogues. Experiments demonstrate that PsyLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on PsyEval and other relevant metrics, validating MCTSr-Zero&#39;s effectiveness in generating high-quality, principle-aligned conversational data for human-centric domains and addressing the LLM challenge of consistently adhering to complex psychological standards.

AAAI 2026

MCTSr-Zero: Self-Reflective Psychological Counseling Dialogues Generation via Principles and Adaptive Exploration

The integration of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant success in structured, problem-oriented tasks. However, applying these methods to open-ended dialogues, such as those in psychological counseling, presents unique challenges. Unlike tasks with objective correctness, success in therapeutic conversations depends on subjective factors like empathetic engagement, ethical adherence, and alignment with human preferences, for which strict correctness criteria are ill-defined. Existing result-oriented MCTS approaches can therefore produce misaligned responses. To address this, we introduce MCTSr-Zero, an MCTS framework designed for open-ended, human-centric dialogues. Its core innovation is domain alignment, which shifts the MCTS search objective from predefined end-states towards conversational trajectories that conform to target domain principles (e.g., empathy in counseling). Furthermore, MCTSr-Zero incorporates Regeneration and Meta-Prompt Adaptation mechanisms to substantially broaden exploration by allowing the MCTS to consider fundamentally different initial dialogue strategies. We evaluate MCTSr-Zero in psychological counseling by generating multi-turn dialogue data, which is used to fine-tune an LLM, PsyLLM. We also introduce PsyEval, a benchmark for assessing multi-turn psychological counseling dialogues. Experiments demonstrate that PsyLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on PsyEval and other relevant metrics, validating MCTSr-Zero's effectiveness in generating high-quality, principle-aligned conversational data for human-centric domains and addressing the LLM challenge of consistently adhering to complex psychological standards.

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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.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed over proprietary knowledge bases face growing threats from reconstruction attacks that aggregate model responses to replicate knowledge bases. Such attacks exploit both intra-class and inter-class paths—progressively extracting fine-grained knowledge within topics and diffusing it across semantically related ones, thereby enabling comprehensive extraction of the original knowledge base. However, existing defenses target only one path, leaving the other unprotected. We conduct a systematic exploration to assess the impact of protecting each path independently and find that joint protection is essential for effective defense. Based on this, we propose RAGFort, a structure-aware dual-module defense combining contrastive reindexing for inter-class isolation and constrained cascade generation for intra-class protection. Experiments across security, performance, and robustness confirm that RAGFort significantly reduces reconstruction success while preserving answer quality, offering the first comprehensive defense against knowledge base extraction attacks.

RAGFort: Dual-Path Defense Against Proprietary Knowledge Base Extraction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Film set design plays a pivotal role in cinematic storytelling and shaping the visual atmosphere. However, the traditional process depends on expert-driven manual modeling, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we introduce FilmSceneDesigner, an automated scene generation system that emulates professional film set design workflow. Given a natural language description, including scene type, historical period, and style, we design an agent-based chaining framework to generate structured parameters aligned with film set design workflow, guided by prompt strategies that ensure parameter accuracy and coherence. On the other hand, we propose a procedural generation pipeline which executes a series of dedicated functions with the structured parameters for floorplan and structure generation, material assignment, door and window placement, and object retrieval and layout, ultimately constructing a complete film scene from scratch. Moreover, to enhance cinematic realism and asset diversity, we construct SetDepot-Pro, a curated dataset of 6,862 film-specific 3D assets and 733 materials. Experimental results and human evaluations demonstrate that our system produces structurally sound scenes with strong cinematic fidelity, supporting downstream tasks such as virtual previs, construction drawing and mood board creation.

FilmSceneDesigner: Chaining Set Design for Procedural Film Scene Generation

This paper introduces the Functionality-Driven Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization (FD-MAGRPO) algorithm, which is designed to enhance exploration efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL) for analog integrated circuit sizing. Our proposed method integrates two key innovations: (1) a critic-free multi-agent optimization framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that eliminates the critic network and achieves stable and efficient policy updates; and (2) a functionality-driven grouping strategy, that enables agents to coordinate exploration by functional roles instead of circuit blocks, thereby improving credit assignment and cooperation. Experimental results on practical low-dropout regulator (LDO) circuits with 65–179 design parameters show that the proposed method achieves rapid convergence with only 800–3000 simulations, yielding a 4.8×–13.0× speedup over state-of-the-art methods. Mathematical analysis and empirical studies validate that the combination of critic-free optimization and functionality-based grouping leads to higher exploration efficiency and faster convergence. The proposed method enables the discovery of higher circuit performances that are inaccessible to conventional approaches, establishing FD-MAGRPO as a robust and efficient solution for complex analog-LDO sizing tasks.

FD-MAGRPO: Functionality-Driven Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization for Analog-LDO Sizing

Rain significantly degrades the performance of computer vision systems, particularly in applications like autonomous driving and video surveillance. While existing deraining methods have made considerable progress, they often struggle with fidelity of semantic and spatial details. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-Prior Hierarchical Mamba (MPHM) network for image deraining. This novel architecture synergistically integrates macro-semantic textual priors (CLIP) for task-level semantic guidance and micro-structural visual priors (DINOv2) for scene-aware structural information. To alleviate potential conflicts between heterogeneous priors, we devise a progressive Priors Fusion Injection (PFI) that strategically injects complementary cues at different decoder levels. Meanwhile, we equip the backbone network with an elaborate Hierarchical Mamba Module (HMM) to facilitate robust feature representation, featuring a Fourier-enhanced dual-path design that concurrently addresses global context modeling and local detail recovery. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate MPHM's state-of-the-art performance, achieving a 0.57 dB PSNR gain on the Rain200H dataset while delivering superior generalization on real-world rainy scenarios.

Semantics and Content Matter: Towards Multi-Prior Hierarchical Mamba for Image Deraining

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, yet they continue to struggle with multi-step mathematical reasoning, where correctness depends on a precise chain of intermediate steps. Preference optimization methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved answer-level alignment, but they often overlook the reasoning process itself, providing little supervision over intermediate steps that are critical for complex problem-solving. Existing fine-grained approaches typically rely on strong annotators or reward models to assess the quality of individual steps. However, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking. To address this, we propose \textbf{ISLA}, a reward-model-free framework that constructs step-level preference data directly from SFT gold traces. ISLA also introduces a self-improving pruning mechanism that identifies informative steps based on two signals: their marginal contribution to final accuracy (\textit{relative accuracy}) and the model’s \textit{uncertainty}, inspired by the concept of information gain. Empirically, ISLA achieves better performance than DPO while using only 12\% of the training tokens, demonstrating that careful step-level selection can significantly improve both reasoning accuracy and training efficiency.

Beyond Step Pruning: Information Theory Based Step-level Optimization for Self-Refining Large Language Models

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from two primary perspectives: spectral, which employs global graph signal filtering and is theoretically more expressive, and spatial, which builds on local neighborhood aggregation and generalizes well across diverse graph structures. While spectral GNNs are expected to perform better in theory, they often underperform in practice compared to spatial models.
To better understand this gap, we introduce a novel theoretical framework for converting spectral GNNs into the spatial domain, allowing for more intuitive analysis. This transformation reveals that signal looping and repeated high-order aggregation are major causes of over-smoothing in spatial GNNs. By addressing these issues in the spatial domain and converting the model back to the spectral domain, we propose DeloopSGNN, a spectral GNN with improved expressive capacity.
Experiments on benchmark datasets show that DeloopSGNN achieves consistently strong performance in terms of accuracy and adversarial robustness, demonstrating that spectral GNNs can benefit significantly from careful architectural design grounded in our proposed framework.

DeloopSGNN: Revisiting Spectral GNNs Through the Lens of Spatial Aggregation

Time-Series (TS) exhibits pronounced non-stationarity. Consequently, most forecasting methods display compromised robustness to concept drift, despite the prevalent application of instance normalization. We tackle this challenge by first analysing concept drift through a bias-variance lens and proving that weighted ensemble reduces variance without increasing bias. These insights motivate DeepBooTS, a novel end-to-end dual-stream residual-decreasing boosting method that progressively reconstructs the intrinsic signal. In our design, each block of a deep model becomes an ensemble of learners with an auxiliary output branch forming a highway to the final prediction. The block‑wise outputs correct the residuals of previous blocks, leading to a learning‑driven decomposition of both inputs and targets. This method enhances versatility and interpretability while substantially improving robustness to concept drift. Extensive experiments, including those on large-scale datasets, show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods by a large margin, yielding an average performance improvement of 15.8% across various datasets, establishing a new benchmark for TS forecasting.

DeepBooTS: Dual-Stream Residual Boosting for Drift-Resilient Time-Series Forecasting

Recently, Few-shot Learning (FSL) has become a popular task that aims to recognize new classes from only a few labeled examples and has been widely applied in fields such as natural science, remote sensing, and medical images.
However, most existing methods focus only on the visual modality and compute prototypes directly from raw support images, which lack comprehensive and rich multimodal information.
To address these limitations, we propose a novel Multimodal Prototype Augmentation FSL framework called MPA, including LLM-based Multi-Variant Semantic Enhancement (LMSE), Hierarchical Multi-View Augmentation (HMA), and an Adaptive Uncertain Class Absorber (AUCA). 
LMSE leverages large language models to generate diverse paraphrased category descriptions, enriching the support set with additional semantic cues. 
HMA exploits both natural and multi-view augmentations to enhance feature diversity (e.g., changes in viewing distance, camera angles, and lighting conditions). 
AUCA models uncertainty by introducing uncertain classes via interpolation and Gaussian sampling, effectively absorbing uncertain samples. 
Extensive experiments on four single-domain and six cross-domain FSL benchmarks demonstrate that MPA consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a big margin. Notably, MPA surpasses the second-best method by 12.29\% and 24.56\% in the single-domain and cross-domain setting, respectively, in the 5-way 1-shot setting. All source code will be publicly available.

MPA: Multimodal Prototype Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning

Pretrained vision-language models exhibit strong zero-shot classification capabilities, but their predictions degrade significantly under common image corruptions. To improve robustness, many test-time adaptation (TTA) methods adopt positive data augmentation (PDA), which generates multiple views of each test sample to reduce prediction variance. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations. First, it introduces considerable computational overhead due to the large number of augmentations required per image. Second, it fails to mitigate prediction bias, where the model tends to predict certain classes disproportionately under corruption, as PDA operates on corrupted inputs and typically does not remove the corruption itself. To address these challenges, we propose Panda, a novel TTA method based on negative data augmentation (NDA). Unlike positive augmentations that preserve object semantics, Panda generates negative augmentations by disrupting semantic content. It divides images into patches and randomly assembles them from a shared patch pool. These negatively augmented images retain corruption-specific features while discarding object-relevant signals. We then subtract the mean feature of these negative samples from the original image feature, effectively suppressing corruption-related components while preserving class-relevant information. This mitigates prediction bias under distribution shifts. Importantly, Panda allows augmentation to be shared across samples within a batch, resulting in minimal computational overhead. Panda can be seamlessly integrated into existing test-time adaptation frameworks and substantially improve their robustness. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Panda on standard corruption benchmarks. Our experiments indicate that Panda delivers superior performance compared to PDA methods, and a wide range of TTA methods exhibit significantly enhanced performance when integrated with Panda.

Panda: Test-Time Adaptation with Negative Data Augmentation

How can vision-language-action (VLA) models adapt to new environments where world dynamics shift?
While recent research has combined world modeling and action prediction to improve VLA performance, existing methods largely rely on pretraining in static datasets, without mechanisms for active adaptation to new environments. As a result, these models often fail to generalize when deployed in unseen scenarios with novel object configurations or dynamics.

We present WorldAgen, a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction while enabling test-time training (TTT) to adapt to new environments. WorldAgen employs a shared Transformer backbone with two heads: (1) a world-model head that predicts future states from past state-action trajectories, and (2) an agent-model head that predicts actions conditioned on task instructions. During test time, WorldAgen samples exploratory actions, collects ground-truth state transitions, and performs lightweight TTT updates to refine its world model. This adaptation improves the model's understanding to the environments and leads to more accurate action predictions.

Experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks demonstrate that our baseline model achieves comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to current state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, with TTT on a small number of samples, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art models, highlighting the effectiveness of adapting world models at inference time.

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RAGFort: Dual-Path Defense Against Proprietary Knowledge Base Extraction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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