Singapore

Protein design is revolutionizing biotechnology, yet existing approaches struggle to balance structural foldability with functional performance. Structure-based models excel at generating stable protein backbones but often overlook critical functional properties, while protein language models capture evolutionary and functional signals but frequently predict sequences lacking structural stability. Integrating these complementary approaches remains challenging due to their inherently conflicting objectives.
We present MAProt, a multi-agent framework that synergistically combines structure-based and protein language model-based methods for protein design. Each agent specializes in a distinct aspect of the design objective: the structure-based agent (e.g., ProteinMPNN) ensures compatibility with the target backbone, while protein language model-based agents (e.g., ESM, SaProt) capture evolutionary plausibility and functional potential. To reconcile conflicts and achieve optimal trade-offs, we introduce a Pareto-based negotiation module that enables effective multi-objective coordination and consensus among agents.
Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAProt achieves a remarkable improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, and generalizes robustly across a range of tasks, including thermodynamic folding stability design, functional protein design, and high-affinity antibody design. These results highlight the power of collaborative optimization for advancing rational protein engineering.

AAAI 2026

Advancing Protein Design via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Pareto-Based Collaborative Optimization

protein design

poster

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.

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that capture visual information through asynchronous brightness changes, offering distinct advantages including high temporal resolution and wide dynamic range. While prior research has investigated event-based 3D reconstruction for extreme scenarios, existing methods face inherent limitations and fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of event data.
In this paper, we present EvDiff3D, a novel two-stage 3D reconstruction framework that integrates event-based geometric constraints with an event-aware diffusion prior for appearance refinement. Our key insight lies in bridging the gap between physically grounded event-based reconstruction and data-driven appearance repair through a unified cyclical pipeline. In the first stage, we reconstruct a coarse 3D scene under supervision from event loss and event-based monocular depth constraints to preserve structural fidelity. 
The second stage fine-tunes an event-aware diffusion model based on a pretrained video diffusion model as a repair prior to enhance the appearance in under-constrained regions.
Based on the diffusion model, our pipeline operates within a reconstruction-generation cycle that progressively refines both geometry and appearance using only event data.
Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that EvDiff3D significantly outperforms existing methods in perceptual quality and structural consistency.

EvDiff3D: Event-Aware Diffusion Repair for High-Fidelity Event-Based 3D Reconstruction

Multi-subject video generation aims to synthesize videos from textual prompts and multiple reference images, ensuring that each subject preserves natural scale and visual fidelity. However, current methods face two challenges: scale inconsistency, where variations in subject size lead to unnatural generation, and permutation sensitivity, where the order of reference inputs causes subject distortion.
In this paper, we propose MoFu, a unified framework that tackles both challenges. For scale inconsistency, we introduce Scale-Aware Modulation (SMO), an LLM-guided module that extracts implicit scale cues from the prompt and modulates features to ensure consistent subject sizes. To address permutation sensitivity, we present a simple yet effective Fourier Fusion strategy that processes the frequency information of reference features via the Fast Fourier Transform to produce a unified representation. Besides, we design a Scale-Permutation Stability Loss to jointly encourage scale-consistent and permutation-invariant generation.
To further evaluate these challenges, we establish a dedicated benchmark with controlled variations in subject scale and reference permutation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoFu significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving natural scale, subject fidelity, and overall visual quality.

MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) has recently been explored to empower Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) with more comprehensive and up-to-date contextual knowledge, aiming to compensate for their limited and coarse-grained parametric knowledge in knowledge-intensive tasks. 
However, the retrieved contextual knowledge is usually not aligned with LVLMs’ internal parametric knowledge, leading to knowledge conflicts and further unreliable or inconsistent LVLM responses. 
To tackle this issue, we design KCM, a training-free and plug-and-play framework that can effectively mitigate knowledge conflicts while incorporating MRAG for more accurate LVLM responses. 
KCM enhances contextual knowledge utilization by modifying the LVLM architecture from three key perspectives. First, KCM adaptively adjusts attention distributions among multiple attention heads, encouraging LVLMs to focus on contextual knowledge with reduced distraction. 
Second, KCM identifies and prunes knowledge-centric LVLM neurons that encode coarse-grained parametric knowledge, thereby suppressing interferences and enabling more effective integration of contextual knowledge. 
Third, KCM amplifies the information flow from the input context by injecting supplementary context logits, reinforcing its contribution to the final output. 
Extensive experiments over multiple widely adopted LVLMs and benchmarks show that KCM outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins, incurring neither extra training nor external tools. Code and data will be released.

Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Vision Language Models via Knowledge Conflict Mitigation

Large language models (LLMs) concentrate substantial knowledge in specialized domains due to extensive pretraining and instruction tuning, and they are now central to commercial and scientific practice. Yet access is usually limited to costly, rate limited interfaces, which motivates methods that can extract targeted domain knowledge with minimal querying effort. A further challenge is that the target domain may be unknown in advance, so naive or generic prompts waste queries and fail to expose the underlying concepts and relations that structure the domain.
In this work, we introduce a query efficient approach for domain specific knowledge stealing from black box language models. Rather than issuing random questions or generic templates, our framework performs self directed exploration that lets the model find the direction and mine domain knowledge by itself. Starting from a small and diverse seed, it discovers salient domain entities and induces their relations through structured question families that elicit definitional, functional, and compositional information. A feedback driven controller analyzes the errors and uncertainty of the extracted student model and uses this signal to refine subsequent queries, all without any prior domain knowledge or external resources.
We evaluate the method in two expert centric settings, medicine and finance, and observe consistently better performance while requiring significantly fewer queries.

Query-Efficient Domain Knowledge Stealing Against Large Language Models

Unsupervised video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) is promising as it enables object-level scene representation and dynamics modeling as we humans do.
Mainstream video OCL methods adopt a recurrent architecture: An aggregator aggregates current video frame into object features, termed slots, under some queries; A transitioner transits current slots to queries for the next frame.
This is an effective architecture but all existing implementations both (\textit{i1}) neglect to incorporate next frame features, the most informative source for query prediction, and (\textit{i2}) fail to learn transition dynamics, the knowledge essential for query prediction.
To address these issues, we propose Random Slot-Feature pair for learning Query prediction (RandSF.Q): (\textit{t1}) We design a new transitioner to incorporate both slots and features, which provides more information for query prediction; (\textit{t2}) We train the transitioner to predict queries from slot-feature pairs randomly sampled from available recurrences, which drives it to learn transition dynamics.
Experiments on scene representation demonstrate that our method surpass existing video OCL methods significantly, e.g., up to 10 points on object discovery, setting new state-of-the-art. Such superiority also benefits downstream tasks like dynamics modeling.
Our core source code and training logs are available as the supplement.

Predicting Video Slot Attention Queries from Random Slot-Feature Pairs

Neural Differential Equations (NDEs) excel at modeling continuous-time dynamics, effectively handling challenges such as irregular observations, missing values, and noise. Despite their advantages, NDEs face a fundamental challenge in adopting dropout, a cornerstone of deep learning regularization, making them susceptible to overfitting. To address this research gap, we introduce Continuum Dropout, a universally applicable regularization technique for NDEs built upon the theory of alternating renewal processes. Continuum Dropout formulates the on-off mechanism of dropout as a stochastic process that alternates between active (evolution) and inactive (paused) states in continuous time. This provides a principled approach to prevent overfitting and enhance the generalization capabilities of NDEs. Moreover, Continuum Dropout offers a structured framework to quantify predictive uncertainty via Monte Carlo sampling at test time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Continuum Dropout outperforms existing regularization methods for NDEs, achieving superior performance on various time series and image classification tasks. It also yields better-calibrated and more trustworthy probability estimates, highlighting its effectiveness for uncertainty-aware modeling.

Continuum Dropout for Neural Differential Equations

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training across decentralized data, but faces key challenges of bidirectional communication overhead and client-side data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose pFed1BS, a novel personalized federated learning framework that achieves extreme communication compression through one-bit random sketching. Specifically, clients transmit highly compressed one-bit sketches of local model parameters, while the server aggregates these sketches into a global one-bit consensus vector and broadcasts it to all clients. For data heterogeneity, we introduce a sign-based regularizer into the objective function, guiding the optimization of personalized models that simultaneously align with the global consensus and preserve local data characteristics. To mitigate the computational burden of random sketching, we employ the Fast Hadamard Transform as an efficient projection mechanism, achieving near-linear computational complexity concerning the model dimension. Theoretical analysis guarantees that our algorithm converges to a stationary neighborhood of the global potential function. Numerical simulations demonstrate that pFed1BS substantially reduces communication costs while achieving competitive performance compared to advanced one-bit FL algorithms.

Personalized Federated Learning with Bidirectional Communication Compression via One-Bit Random Sketching

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) focuses on improving visual quality from various underwater scenes. Existing methods simplistically treat various degradations as homogeneous, disregarding their intrinsic connections and causing models to blindly learn, resulting in conflicting optimization goals and visual distortions. To address above limitations, we propose a Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception (CPLDP) model, which employs conditional prompt as degradation perception priors and guides underwater image enhancement. Specifically, we show that the natural language prompts not only promote distinguishing different degraded images, but also aid in exploring more details with semantic information. Therefore, the proposed method generates five key degradation prompts (green/blue/green-blue color casts, uneven illumination and blurriness) with conditional prompt learning. Subsequently, considering the intrinsic relationships among different degradations, we employ degradation perceptions as priors and fine-tune the learning strategy to enhance underwater images. During training, an adaptive loss function with multi-degradations is designed, allowing it to effectively handle the task conflicts among multiple underwater degradations. Additionally, we conduct a human visual-based underwater dataset with various degradation types by subjective statistics. Extensive experiments on both full-reference and no-reference datasets demonstrate that our CPLDP can achieve better visual results and outperform state-of-the-art UIE methods across various degradation scenarios.

Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception for Underwater Image Enhancement

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning in structured domains like mathematics and programming, its application to general-domain reasoning tasks remains challenging due to the absence of verifiable reward signals. To this end, methods like Reinforcement Learning with Reference Probability Reward (RLPR) have emerged, leveraging the probability of generating the final answer as a reward signal. However, these outcome-focused approaches neglect crucial step-by-step supervision of the reasoning process itself. To address this gap, we introduce Probabilistic Process Supervision (P2S), a novel self-supervision framework that provides fine-grained process rewards without requiring a separate reward model or human-annotated reasoning steps. During reinforcement learning, P2S synthesizes and filters high-quality reference reasoning chain (gold-CoT). The core of our method is to calculate a Path Faithfulness Reward (PFR) for each reasoning step, which is derived from the conditional probability of generating the gold-CoT's suffix, given the model's current reasoning prefix. Crucially, this PFR can be flexibly integrated with any outcome-based reward, directly tackling the reward sparsity problem by providing dense guidance. Extensive experiments on reading comprehension and medical Question Answering benchmarks show that P2S significantly outperforms strong baselines.

P2S: Probabilistic Process Supervision for General-Domain Reasoning Question Answering

Given the remarkable performance of diffusion models in image generation, recent research has been exploring their adaptation to style transfer. However, current diffusion-based approaches encounter persistent challenges, such as style distortions and the reliance on textual prompts for content preservation. To address these limitations, we introduce StyleFM, a novel training-free diffusion-based style transfer approach that incorporates optimization strategies into both the frequency and temporal domains. The proposed method provides two core innovations: (1) Tripartite Frequency Manipulation: To more precisely tailor frequency manipulation, StyleFM introduces a tripartite frequency design with a buffer band accounting for the overlap of content and style representations. In addition, StyleFM designs a frequency superposition editing method to achieve frequency enhancement. (2) Recursive Attention: StyleFM proposes the recursive attention strategy within the diffusion process, which facilitates the progressive and consistent injection of style information throughout the temporal process without reliance on text guidance. Experiments demonstrate that StyleFM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. It effectively preserves content fidelity while achieving sufficient style embedding.

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