Singapore

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to predict speakers’ emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual cues. Existing approaches either struggle to capture complex cross‑modal interactions or experience gradient conflicts and unstable training when using deeper architectures. To address these issues, we propose Cross-Space Synergy (CSS), which couples a representation component with an optimization component. Synergistic Polynomial Fusion (SPF) serves the representation role, leveraging low-rank tensor factorization to efficiently capture high-order cross-modal interactions. Pareto Gradient Modulator (PGM) serves the optimization role, steering updates along Pareto-optimal directions across competing objectives to alleviate gradient conflicts and improve stability. Experiments show that CSS outperforms existing representative methods on IEMOCAP and MELD in both accuracy and training stability, verifying its effectiveness in complex multimodal scenarios.

AAAI 2026

Cross-Space Synergy: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

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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.

4D point cloud segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving with continuous LiDAR streams. While test-time adaptation (TTA) is the standard approach for handling dynamic environments, current methods suffer from catastrophic error accumulation due to over-reliance on pseudo-labels. Active learning could provide reliable annotations for critical samples, but combining it with TTA faces severe challenges: realtime processing requirements and expensive 3D labeling costs. In this paper, we propose ATTA-4DSeg, the first framework to achieve efficient active test-time adaptation for 4D point cloud segmentation under extreme budget constraints. Our key insight is a self-reinforcing loop: oracle annotations refine adaptation prototypes, which then guide the selection of subsequent high-value samples from regions with severe distribution shifts, maximizing each annotation’s impact. Specifically, we propose three key innovations: (1) dual-prototype comparison that precisely localizes distribution shift boundaries to narrow annotation scope, (2) Class-Inverse Budget Allocation (CIBA)
ensuring balanced adaptation across all categories, coupled with hybrid uncertainty scoring combining voxel-level geometry and point-wise variance for optimal sample selection, and (3) a refinement strategy leveraging sparse oracle annotations to improve predictions on unlabeled points, maximizing annotation utility. Extensive experiments show ATTA-4DSeg improves mIoU by 18.87%, 19.92%, and 3.6% on three domain adaptation benchmarks using only 1% annotation budget. Our method operates 2.28× faster than state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, our approach reaches 90% of fully-supervised performance using only 5% annotation budget.

4D Point Cloud Segmentation via Active Test-Time Adaptation

Despite substantial progress in anomaly synthesis, existing diffusion-based and coarse inpainting pipelines commonly suffer from structural deficiencies such as micro-structural discontinuities, limited semantic controllability, and inefficient generation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ARAS, a language-conditioned, auto-regressive anomaly synthesis approach that precisely injects local, text-specified defects into normal images via token-anchored latent editing. Leveraging a hard-gated auto-regressive operator and a training-free, context-preserving masked sampling kernel, ARAS significantly enhances defect realism, preserves fine-grained material textures, and provides continuous semantic control over synthesized anomalies. Integrated within our Quality-Aware Re-weighted Anomaly Detection (QARAD) framework, we propose a dynamic weighting strategy that emphasizes high-quality synthetic samples by computing an image-text similarity score with a dual-encoder model. Extensive experiments across three datasets, MVTec AD, VisA, and BTAD, demonstrate that our QARAD outperforms SOTA methods in both image- and pixel-level anomaly detection tasks, achieving improved accuracy, robustness, and a 5× synthesis speedup compared to diffusion-based alternatives.

Quality-Aware Language-Conditioned Local Auto-Regressive Anomaly Synthesis and Detection

The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has advanced general video understanding. However, existing video evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on non-interactive videos, such as movies and recordings. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the first omnimodal benchmark for interactive livestream videos, LiViBench. It features a diverse set of 24 tasks, highlighting the perceptual, reasoning, and livestream-specific challenges. To efficiently construct the dataset, we design a standardized semi-automatic annotation workflow that incorporates the human-in-the-loop at multiple stages. The workflow leverages multiple MLLMs to form a multi-agent system for comprehensive video description and uses a seed-question-driven method to construct high-quality annotations. All interactive videos in the benchmark include audio, speech, and real-time comments modalities. To enhance models' understanding of interactive videos, we design tailored two-stage instruction-tuning and propose a Video-to-Comment Retrieval (VCR) module to improve the model's ability to utilize real-time comments. Based on these advancements, we develop LiVi-LLM-7B, an MLLM with enhanced knowledge of interactive livestreams. Experiments show that our model outperforms larger open-source models with up to 72B parameters, narrows the gap with leading proprietary models on LiViBench, and achieves enhanced performance on general video benchmarks, including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoEval-Pro.

LiViBench: An Omnimodal Benchmark for Interactive Livestream Video Understanding

AI systems can perpetuate and amplify existing biases and discrimination, prompting academic efforts to develop mitigation techniques. Despite progress, real-world deployments often expose limitations in current methods and tools--- overlooking preprocessing, adopting poor evaluation protocols, and failing to integrate domain knowledge. These gaps hinder the effectiveness and reproducibility of fairness solutions.
AutoML has emerged as a promising approach to optimize AI pipelines and provide an evaluation framework.
However, challenges persist, especially around: intersectionality support, explainability, and stakeholder engagement, which are crucial for fairness and human-centric AI development.
We introduce HAMLET4Fairness, integrating AutoML with human-centered approaches grounded in logic and argumentation. This enhances interactivity and transparency in AI pipeline optimization while supporting intersectional fairness. HAMLET4Fairness leverages multi-objective optimization and bounds the search space by user-defined constraints, adapting the CRISP-DM methodology for co-design and collaborative problem-solving.
We validate HAMLET4Fairness through real-world case studies, showing improved fairness outcomes and scalability. The evaluation also offers insights into how preprocessing choices affect fairness performance.

HAMLET4Fairness: Enhancing Fairness in AI Pipelines Through Human-Centered AutoML and Argumentation

Online continual learning (OCL) aims at learning a non-stationary data stream in a way of reading each data sample only once, and hence suffers from the trade-off of catastrophic forgetting and insufficient learning. In this work, we firstly analytically establish relationship between loss functions and model parameters from the Bayesian perspective. Based on our analysis, we subsequently propose a parameter merging method with gradient-guided supermasks. Our method leverages 1-order and 2-order gradient information to construct supermasks that determine the merging weights between the old and new models. Our method performs direct arithmetic operations on parameters to update models, beyond traditional gradient descent. We further discover that a widely-used premise that 1-order gradients can be negligible is invalid in OCL, due to slow convergence incurred by insufficient learning. Additionally, we utilize a dual-model dual-view distillation strategy that can align output distributions of the new and merged models for each sample, further enhancing model performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmarks in OCL settings, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-100. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective, and achieves a substantial boost over previous methods.

Parameter Merging with Gradient-Guided Supermasks in Online Continual Learning

Human-AI cooperative classification (HAI-CC) aims to develop hybrid intelligent systems that enhance decision-making in various high-stakes real-world scenarios by leveraging both human expertise and AI capabilities. Current HAI-CC methods primarily focus on learning-to-defer (L2D), where decisions are deferred to human experts when AI is not confident, and learning-to-complement (L2C), where AI and human experts make predictions cooperatively. However, existing research in both L2D and L2C has not effectively been explored under diverse expert knowledge to improve decision-making, particularly when constrained by the operation cost of human involvement. In this paper, we address this research gap by proposing the Coverage-constrained Learning to Defer and Complement with Specific Experts (CL2DC) method. In particular, CL2DC assesses input data before making final decisions through either AI prediction alone or by deferring to or complementing a specific human expert. Furthermore, we propose a coverage-constrained optimisation to control the cooperation cost, ensuring it approximates a target probability for AI-only selection. This approach enables an effective assessment of system performance within a specified budget. Comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that CL2DC achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art HAI-CC methods.

Coverage-Constrained Human-AI Cooperation with Multiple Experts

LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit strong collaborative capabilities but often suffer from redundant communication and excessive token overhead. Existing methods typically enhance efficiency through pretrained GNNs or greedy algorithms, but often isolate pre- and post-task optimization, lacking a unified strategy. To this end, we present SafeSieve, a progressive and adaptive multi-agent pruning algorithm that dynamically refines the inter-agent communication through a novel dual-mechanism. SafeSieve integrates initial LLM-based semantic evaluation with accumulated performance feedback, enabling a smooth transition from heuristic initialization to experience-driven refinement. Unlike existing greedy Top-k pruning methods, SafeSieve employs 0-extension clustering to preserve structurally coherent agent groups while eliminating ineffective links. Experiments across benchmarks (SVAMP, HumanEval, etc.) showcase that SafeSieve achieves 94.01\% average accuracy while reducing token usage by 12.4\%-27.8\%. Results further demonstrate robustness under prompt injection attacks (1.23\% average accuracy drop). In heterogeneous settings, SafeSieve reduces deployment costs by 13.3\% while maintaining performance. These results establish SafeSieve as a robust, efficient, and scalable framework for practical multi-agent systems. Our code can be found in the Supplementary Material.

SafeSieve: From Heuristics to Experience in Progressive Pruning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Communication

Conventional fairness in multi-tenant Large Language Model (LLM) inference services is typically defined by system-centric metrics, such as equitable resource allocation. This paper argues that this paradigm is fundamentally flawed, as it creates a gap between measured system performance and actual user-perceived quality. We challenge this notion by introducing and formalizing Experiential Fairness, a user-centric paradigm that shifts the objective from equality of opportunity (resource access) to equity of outcome (user experience). To operationalize this, we propose ExFairS, a lightweight scheduling framework that evaluates each user's state via a composite metric integrating SLO compliance with resource consumption, and then acts on this evaluation through a credit-based priority mechanism. Extensive experiments on an 8-GPU NVIDIA V100 node show that ExFairS reduces the SLO violation rate by up to 100% and improves system throughput by 14-21.9%, outperforming state-of-the-art schedulers and delivering a demonstrably higher degree of Experiential Fairness.

Experiential Fairness: Bridging the Gap Between User Experience and Resource-Centric Fairness in Online LLM Services

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly accelerated the adoption of speech recognition technology, leading to its widespread integration across various applications. However, this surge in usage also highlights a critical issue: audio data is highly vulnerable to unauthorized exposure and analysis, posing significant privacy risks for businesses and individuals. This paper introduces an Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example (IO-RAE) framework, the pioneering method designed to safeguard audio privacy using reversible adversarial examples. IO-RAE leverages large language models to generate misleading yet contextually coherent content, effectively preventing unauthorized eavesdropping by humans and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Additionally, we propose the Cumulative Signal Attack technique, which mitigates high-frequency noise and enhances attack efficacy by targeting low-frequency signals. Our approach ensures the protection of audio data without degrading its quality or usability. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a targeted misguidance rate of 96.5% and a remarkable 100% untargeted misguidance rate in obfuscating target keywords across multiple ASR models, including a commercial black-box system from Google. Furthermore, the quality of the recovered audio, measured by the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality score, reached 4.45, comparable to high-quality original recordings. Notably, the recovered audio processed by ASR systems exhibited an error rate of 0%, indicating nearly lossless recovery. These results highlight the practical applicability and effectiveness of our IO-RAE framework in protecting sensitive audio privacy.

IO-RAE: Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example for Audio Privacy Protection

Sparse Urban CrowdSensing (Sparse UCS) is a practical paradigm for completing full sensing maps from limited observations. However, existing methods typically rely on a time-discrete assumption, where data is considered static within fixed intervals. This simplification introduces significant errors as real-world data changes continuously. To address this, we propose a framework for time-continuous data completion. Our approach, Time-Aware Mamba-based Deep Matrix Factorization (TIME-DMF), leverages the Mamba architecture as a powerful temporal encoder. Crucially, we enhance Mamba with a novel time-aware mechanism that explicitly incorporates the actual, often irregular, physical time intervals between observations into its state transitions. This allows our model to accurately capture true temporal dynamics and generate high-fidelity data for any queried moment in time through a query-generate mechanism. Extensive experiments on five diverse sensing tasks demonstrate that TIME-DMF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the superiority of the time-continuous paradigm for Sparse UCS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Time-DMF-B373/.

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4D Point Cloud Segmentation via Active Test-Time Adaptation

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