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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scalable tools for pilot testing, predicting public opinion distributions before deploying costly surveys. However, the prevailing paradigm for evaluating these models relies on traditional structured surveys—a methodology misaligned with the more realistic scenarios like social media where opinions are rich in digital contexts. By design, surveys strip away the social and cultural context that shapes public opinion, and LLM benchmarks built on this paradigm inherit these critical limitations. To bridge this gap, we introduce MindVote, the first benchmark for public opinion prediction grounded in authentic social media discourse. MindVote is constructed from 3,918 naturalistic polls sourced from Reddit and Weibo, spanning 23 topics and enriched with detailed annotations for platform and topical context. Using this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 15 LLMs, revealing a critical &quot;survey-based specialization pitfall&quot; where models fine-tuned on traditional surveys underperform their general-purpose counterparts and demonstrating the necessity of context in social media. MindVote provides a robust, ecologically valid framework to move beyond survey-based evaluations and advance the development of social intelligent AI systems.

AAAI 2026

MindVote: When AI Meets the Wild West of Social Media Opinion

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scalable tools for pilot testing, predicting public opinion distributions before deploying costly surveys. However, the prevailing paradigm for evaluating these models relies on traditional structured surveys—a methodology misaligned with the more realistic scenarios like social media where opinions are rich in digital contexts. By design, surveys strip away the social and cultural context that shapes public opinion, and LLM benchmarks built on this paradigm inherit these critical limitations. To bridge this gap, we introduce MindVote, the first benchmark for public opinion prediction grounded in authentic social media discourse. MindVote is constructed from 3,918 naturalistic polls sourced from Reddit and Weibo, spanning 23 topics and enriched with detailed annotations for platform and topical context. Using this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 15 LLMs, revealing a critical "survey-based specialization pitfall" where models fine-tuned on traditional surveys underperform their general-purpose counterparts and demonstrating the necessity of context in social media. MindVote provides a robust, ecologically valid framework to move beyond survey-based evaluations and advance the development of social intelligent AI systems.

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.

Multi-view diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading has achieved remarkable performance by capturing more comprehensive pathological features than single-view methods. However, complete multi-view fundus images are often difficult to obtain in clinical practice, and the performance degrades significantly when fewer views are available. To overcome this limitation, we propose the first incomplete multi-view DR grading framework, aiming to provide accurate diagnosis regardless of the number of available views. It introduces two novel modules. First, cross-view spatial correlation attention (CSCA) captures region correlations across views, automatically identifying and fusing diagnostically relevant spatial features to improve feature representation. Second, self-supervised mask consistency learning (SMCL) formulates a novel pretext task of missing-view information reconstruction by strategically masking inter- and intra-view regions, enabling the model to infer complete features from incomplete views. Benefiting from CSCA and SMCL, our method enhances structural feature consistency across views and effectively compensates for missing information during DR grading. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art grading performance, particularly under realistic conditions where some views are unavailable.

Incomplete Multi-view Diabetic Retinopathy Grading via Self-Supervised Inter- and Intra-View Restoration

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) facilitates knowledge transfer from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs by learning domain-invariant representations, which is essential in applications such as molecular property prediction and social network analysis. However, most existing GDA methods rely on the assumption of clean source labels, which rarely holds in real-world scenarios where annotation noise is pervasive. This label noise severely impairs feature alignment and degrades adaptation performance under domain shifts. To address this challenge, we propose Nested Graph Pseudo-Label Refinement (NeGPR), a novel framework tailored for graph-level domain adaptation with noisy labels. NeGPR first pretrains dual branches, i.e., semantic and topology branches, by enforcing neighborhood consistency in the feature space, thereby reducing the influence of noisy supervision. To bridge domain gaps, NeGPR employs a nested refinement mechanism in which one branch selects high-confidence target samples to guide the adaptation of the other, enabling progressive cross-domain learning. Furthermore, since pseudo-labels may still contain noise and the pre-trained branches are already overfitted to the noisy labels in the source domain, NeGPR incorporates a noise-aware regularization strategy. This regularization is theoretically proven to mitigate the adverse effects of pseudo-label noise, even under the presence of source overfitting, thus enhancing the robustness of the adaptation process. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that NeGPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under severe label noise.

Nested Graph Pseudo-Label Refinement for Noisy Label Domain Adaptation Learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), especially temporally resolved datasets, enables genome-wide profiling of gene expression dynamics at single-cell resolution across discrete time points. However, current technologies provide only sparse, static snapshots of cell states and are inherently influenced by technical noise, complicating the inference and representation of continuous transcriptional dynamics. Although embedding methods can reduce dimensionality and mitigate technical noise, the majority of existing approaches typically treat trajectory inference separately from embedding construction, often neglecting temporal structure. To address this challenge, here we introduce CellStream, a novel deep learning framework that jointly learns embedding and cellular dynamics from single-cell snapshot data by integrating an autoencoder with unbalanced dynamical optimal transport. Compared to existing methods, CellStream generates dynamics-informed embeddings that robustly capture temporal developmental processes while maintaining high consistency with the underlying data manifold. We demonstrate CellStream’s effectiveness on both simulated datasets and real scRNA-seq data, including spatial transcriptomics. Our experiments indicate significant quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art methods in representing cellular trajectories with enhanced temporal coherence and reduced noise sensitivity. Overall, CellStream provides a new tool for learning and representing continuous streams from the noisy, static snapshots of single-cell gene expression.

CellStream: Dynamical Optimal Transport Informed Embeddings for Reconstructing Cellular Trajectories from Snapshots Data

Autoformalization aims to translate natural-language mathematical statements into a formal language. While LLMs have accelerated progress in this area, existing methods still suffer from low accuracy. We identify two key abilities for effective autoformalization: comprehensive mastery of formal-language domain knowledge, and reasoning capability of natural language problem understanding and informal-formal alignment. Without the former, a model cannot identify the correct formal objects; without the latter, it struggles to interpret real-world contexts and map them precisely into formal expressions. To address these gaps, we introduce ThinkingF, a data synthesis and training pipeline that improves both abilities. First, we construct two datasets: one by distilling and selecting large-scale examples rich in formal knowledge, and another by generating informal-to-formal reasoning trajectories guided by expert-designed templates. We then apply SFT and RLVR with these datasets to further fuse and refine the two abilities. The resulting 7B and 32B models exhibit both comprehensive formal knowledge and strong informal-to-formal reasoning. Notably, StepFun-Formalizer-32B achieves SOTA BEq@1 scores of 40.5% on FormalMATH-Lite and 26.7% on ProverBench, surpassing all prior general-purpose and specialized models.

StepFun-Formalizer: Unlocking the Autoformalization Potential of LLMs Through Knowledge-Reasoning Fusion

We formalize AI alignment as a multi-objective optimization problem called $\langle M,N,\varepsilon,\delta\rangle$-agreement that generalizes prior approaches with fewer assumptions, in which a set of $N$ agents (including humans) must reach approximate ($\varepsilon$) agreement across $M$ candidate objectives with probability at least $1-\delta$. 
Using communication complexity, we prove an information-theoretic lower bound demonstrating that once either $M$ or $N$ is large enough, no interaction or rationality can avoid intrinsic alignment overheads. 
This barrier establishes rigorous intrinsic limits to alignment \emph{itself}, not merely to specific methods, clarifying a crucial "no free lunch" principle: encoding "all human values" inevitably leads to misalignment, requiring future methods to explicitly manage complexity through consensus-driven reduction or prioritization of objectives. 
Complementing this impossibility result, we provide explicit algorithms achieving alignment under both computationally unbounded and bounded rationality with noisy messages. 
Even in these best-case scenarios where alignment to arbitrary precision is theoretically guaranteed, our analysis identifies three critical scalability barriers: the number of tasks ($M$), agents ($N$), and task state space size ($D$); thereby highlighting fundamental complexity-theoretic constraints and providing guidelines for safer, scalable human–AI collaboration.

Intrinsic Barriers and Practical Pathways for Human–AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

Prompt Tuning (PT) is a widely used strategy for adapting pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. Conventional PT methods evaluate performance separately on known (base) and unknown (new) classes. However, in real-world scenarios, models often encounter inputs without prior knowledge of their class domain. This challenge has motivated the development of Open-world Prompt Tuning (OPT), which requires models to first determine whether a sample belongs to base or new classes and then classify it accordingly. In this work, we carefully review existing OPT methods and identify three key limitations: (L1) incomplete evaluation metrics, (L2) time-consuming and memory-intensive OOD detection methods, and (L3) insufficiently comprehensive optimization strategies. To address these issues, we first tackle L1 by proposing two novel metrics to explicitly evaluate adaptability and generalization under the OPT setting, forming a more comprehensive evaluation framework. For L2, we propose a training-free OOD detection method called Entropy-weighted Rank-normalized Fusion (ERF), which first applies rank normalization to both the maximum and the sum of base-class probabilities, followed by an entropy-weighted fusion of the normalized values. For L3, we propose a plug-and-play Gated Dual-Merging (GDM) strategy to strengthen the classifier’s capability. GDM performs selective merging at the weight level based on an adaptive criterion and combines fine-tuned and LLM-boosted logits at the output level. Extensive experiments on three PT baselines across 11 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ERF and GDM.

Rethinking Open-world Prompt Tuning: A Systematic Framework for Evaluation and Optimization

Class-incremental learning (CIL) enables models to continuously learn from streaming data while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. Our research reveals that the CIL performance of pre-trained models (PTMs) varies significantly across different datasets, a phenomenon underexplored in existing studies. Through visualization, we observe that flatter loss landscapes correlate with superior CIL performance. This insight motivates us to enhance PTMs' CIL capability by promoting loss landscapes' flatness. Initially, we propose independently optimizing multiple adapter branches to equip PTMs with diverse learnable parameters, thereby improving stability during parameter updates. However, given computational and memory constraints, the number of adapters a PTM can accommodate is limited. To address this, we introduce a training strategy with randomized adapter amalgamation (RAA), compelling the model to maintain low loss across a broader and more continuous parameter space, significantly enhancing flatness. Furthermore, we refine existing sharpness-aware minimization techniques to further optimize the loss landscapes. Our extensive experiments and visualization results validate the efficacy of the method, resulting in the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Random Amalgamation of Adapters for Flatter Loss Landscapes: Towards Class-Incremental Learning with Better Stability

Graph fraud detection (GFD) on transaction networks is crucial for safeguarding financial systems. However, due to the limited perspective of existing graph neural networks (GNNs) in the single transaction view, sophisticated fraudsters can disguise themselves to exhibit weak fraud signals, appearing as borderline fraudsters. To address this challenge, we propose **MH-LGC**, a multi-view hypergraph fraud detection model with large language model (LLM) guided contrastive learning. MH-LGC tackles two key limitations of existing GNN-based GFD methods: **(1)** Due to the local aggregation mechanism, existing methods struggle to capture high-order trading patterns among distant fraudsters. MH-LGC introduces two temporal hyper-views as complements to the transaction view and employs a **Temporal Hypergraph Attention Network (THAN)** to integrate the three views. **(2)** Most GFD methods overlook the rich semantic cues embedded in transaction data. Although some general graph learning studies have explore LLM integration, the high computational overhead and task-specific fine-tuning make them impractical for GFD tasks. MH-LGC introduces a semantic view through a fine-tuning-free **LLM-Guided Contrastive learning (LGC)**, adopting a novel paradigm for integrating GNN and LLM to reduce the computational overhead of LLM. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MH-LGC outperforms twelve state-of-the-art baselines, with AUC improvements ranging from 1.10\% to 5.70\%.

Targeting Borderline Fraudsters: Multi-View Hypergraph Fraud Detection with LLM-Guided Contrastive Learning

An autonomous agent deployed to operate over extended
horizons in uncertain environ- ments will encounter
situations for which it was not designed. A class of these
situations involves an invalidation of agent goals and
limited guidance in establishing a new set of goals to
pursue. An agent will benefit from some mechanism that will
allow it to pursue new goals under these circumstances such
that the goals are broadly useful in its environ- ment and
take advantage of its existing skills while aligning with
societal norms. We pro- pose augmenting a goal reasoning
agent, i.e., an agent that can deliberate on and
self-select its goals, with a motivation system that can be
used to both constrain and motivate agent behavior. A
human-like motivation system coupled with a goal-self
concordant selec- tion technique allows the approach to be
framed as an optimization problem in which the agent
selects goals that have high utility while simultaneously
in harmony with its motiva- tions. Over the agent’s
operational lifespan its motivation system adjusts
incrementally to more closely reflect the reality of its
goal reasoning and goal pursuit experiences. Experi- ments
performed with an ablation testing technique comparing the
average utility of goals achieved in the presence and
absence of a motivation system suggest that the motivated
version of the system leads to pursuing more useful goals
than the baseline.

La VIDA: towards a motivated goal reasoning agent

Assumption‐Based Argumentation (ABA) is a powerful structured argumentation formalism, but exact computation of extensions under stable semantics is intractable for large frameworks. We present the first Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach to approximate credulous acceptance in ABA. To leverage GNNs, we model ABA frameworks via a dependency graph representation encoding assumptions, claims and rules as nodes, with heterogeneous edge labels distinguishing support, derive and attack relations. We propose two GNN architectures—ABAGCN and ABAGAT—that stack residual heterogeneous convolution or attention layers, respectively, to learn node embeddings. Our models are trained on the ICCMA 2023 benchmark, augmented with synthetic ABAFs, with hyperparameters optimised via Bayesian search. Empirically, both ABAGCN and ABAGAT outperform a state‐of‐the‐art GNN baseline that we adapt from the abstract argumentation iterature, achieving a node‐level F1 score of up to 0.71 on the ICCMA instances. Finally, we develop a sound polynomial time extension‐reconstruction algorithm driven by our predictor: it reconstructs stable extensions with F1 above 0.85 on small ABAFs and maintains an F1 of about 0.58 on large frameworks. Our work opens new avenues for scalable approximate reasoning in structured argumentation.

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Incomplete Multi-view Diabetic Retinopathy Grading via Self-Supervised Inter- and Intra-View Restoration

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