Singapore

This paper investigates the impact of perturbations on the best-response-based algorithms approximating Nash equilibria in zero-sum games, namely Double Oracle and Fictitious Play. More precisely, we assume that the oracle computing the best responses perturbs the utilities before selecting the best response. We show that using such an oracle reduces the number of iterations for both algorithms. For some cases, suitable perturbations ensure the expected number of iterations is logarithmic. Although the utility perturbation is computationally demanding as it requires iterating through all pure strategies, we demonstrate that one can efficiently perturb the utilities in games where pure strategies have further inner structure.

AAAI 2026

Perturbing Best Responses in Zero-Sum Games

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.

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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.

A primary motivation for analog integrated circuit (IC) design automation is the inefficiency of manual design in meeting increasingly stringent specifications, which often involve over 10 objectives. 
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) emerge as a promising method, yet gaps remain when considering full design specifications, especially under process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations.
Excessive objectives lead to diminished reward signals, while varying PVT conditions result in conflicting gradients, both of which result in inefficient exploration.
To address these, we propose a priority-based graph-enhanced RL framework.
Specifically, using fuzzy logic converts quantitative rewards into qualitative priority signals, mitigating reward deterioration and enhancing exploration via entropy regularization. 
Furthermore, a graph-based representation compresses high-dimensional objective spaces under PVT variations into low-dimensional manifolds, enabling dynamic resource allocation to variation-sensitive regions and resolving gradient conflicts. 
Empirical results on various real-world analog ICs demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RL algorithms, achieving superior solution quality and reducing simulation overhead.

Priority-Based Graph-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Robust Analog Circuit Optimization

Deep ensembles (DE) have emerged as a powerful approach for quantifying predictive uncertainty and distinguishing its aleatoric and epistemic components, thereby enhancing model robustness and reliability. However, their high computational and memory costs during inference pose significant challenges for wide practical deployment. To overcome this issue, we propose credal ensemble distillation (CED), a novel framework that compresses a DE into a single model, CREDIT, for classification tasks. Instead of a single softmax probability distribution, CREDIT predicts class-wise probability intervals that define a credal set, a convex set of probability distributions, for uncertainty quantification. Empirical results on out-of-distribution detection benchmarks demonstrate that CED achieves superior or comparable uncertainty estimation compared to several existing baselines, while substantially reducing inference overhead compared to DE.

Credal Ensemble Distillation for Uncertainty Quantification

One-shot imitation learning (OSIL) offers a promising way to teach robots new skills without large-scale data collection. However, current OSIL methods are primarily limited to short-horizon tasks, thus limiting their applicability to complex, long-horizon manipulations. To address this limitation, we propose ManiLong-Shot, a novel framework that enables effective OSIL for long-horizon prehensile manipulation tasks. ManiLong-Shot structures long-horizon tasks around physical interaction events, reframing the problem as sequencing interaction-aware primitives instead of directly imitating continuous trajectories. This primitive decomposition can be driven by high-level reasoning from a vision-language model (VLM) or by rule-based heuristics derived from robot state changes. For each primitive, ManiLong-Shot predicts invariant regions critical to the interaction, establishes correspondences between the demonstration and the current observation, and computes the target end-effector pose, enabling effective task execution. Extensive simulation experiments show that ManiLong-Shot, trained on only 10 short-horizon tasks, generalizes to 20 unseen long-horizon tasks across three difficulty levels via one-shot imitation, achieving a 22.8\% relative improvement over the SOTA. Additionally, real-robot experiments validate ManiLong-Shot’s ability to robustly execute three long-horizon manipulation tasks via OSIL, confirming its piratical applicability.

ManiLong-Shot: Interaction-Aware One-Shot Imitation Learning for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Multiple clustering aims to discover diverse latent structures from different perspectives, yet existing methods generate exhaustive clusterings without discerning user interest, necessitating laborious manual screening. Current multi-modal solutions suffer from static semantic rigidity: predefined candidate words fail to adapt to dataset-specific concepts, and fixed fusion strategies ignore evolving feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Multi-DProxy, a novel multi-modal dynamic proxy learning framework that leverages cross-modal alignment through learnable textual proxies. Multi-DProxy introduces 1) gated cross-modal fusion that synthesizes discriminative joint representations by adaptively modeling feature interactions. 2) dual-constraint proxy optimization where user interest constraints enforce semantic consistency with domain concepts while concept constraints employ hard example mining to enhance cluster discrimination. 3) dynamic candidate management that refines textual proxies through iterative clustering feedback. Therefore, Multi-DProxy not only effectively captures a user's interest through proxies but also enables the identification of relevant clusterings with greater precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements over existing methods across a broad set of multi-clustering benchmarks.

Multi-modal Dynamic Proxy Learning for Personalized Multiple Clustering

Livestreaming has become increasingly prevalent in modern visual communication, where automatic camera quality tuning is essential for delivering superior user Quality of Experience (QoE). Such tuning requires accurate blind image quality assessment (BIQA) to guide parameter optimization decisions. Unfortunately, the existing BIQA models typically only predict an overall coarse-grained quality score, which cannot provide fine-grained perceptual guidance for precise camera parameter tuning. To bridge this gap, we first establish $\textbf{FGLive-10K}$, a comprehensive fine-grained BIQA database containing 10,185 high-resolution images captured under varying camera parameter configurations across diverse livestreaming scenarios. The dataset features 50,925 multi-attribute quality annotations and 19,234 fine-grained pairwise preference annotations. Based on FGLive-10K, we further develop $\textbf{TuningIQA}$, a fine-grained BIQA metric for livestreaming camera tuning, which integrates human-aware feature extraction and graph-based camera parameter fusion. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that TuningIQA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art BIQA methods in both score regression and fine-grained quality ranking, achieving superior performance when deployed for livestreaming camera tuning.

TuningIQA: Fine-Grained Blind Image Quality Assessment for Livestreaming Camera Tuning

While deep learning models have shown strong performance in simulating neural responses, they often fail to clearly separate stable visual encoding from condition-specific adaptation, which limits their ability to generalize across stimuli and individuals. We introduce the Adaptive Visual Model (AVM), a structure-preserving framework that enables condition-aware adaptation through modular subnetworks, without modifying the core representation. AVM keeps a Vision Transformer-based encoder frozen to capture consistent visual features, while independently trained modulation paths account for neural response variations driven by stimulus content and subject identity. We evaluate AVM in three experimental settings, including stimulus-level variation, cross-subject generalization, and cross-dataset adaptation, all of which involve structured changes in inputs and individuals. Across two large-scale mouse V1 datasets, AVM outperforms the state-of-the-art V1T model by approximately 2\% in predictive correlation, demonstrating robust generalization, interpretable condition-wise modulation, and high architectural efficiency. Specifically, AVM achieves a 9.1\% improvement in explained variance (FEVE) under the cross-dataset adaptation setting. These results suggest that AVM provides a unified framework for adaptive neural modeling across biological and experimental conditions, offering a scalable solution under structural constraints. Its design may inform future approaches to cortical modeling in both neuroscience and biologically inspired AI systems.

AVM: Towards Structure-Preserving Neural Response Modeling in the Visual Cortex Across Stimuli and Individuals

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm for post-training large language models, boosting their reasoning capabilities. Such approaches compute an advantage value for each sample, reflecting better or worse performance than expected, thereby yielding both positive and negative signals for training. However, existing approaches often mix them indiscriminately, especially in the early stages, leading to ambiguous guidance and limited gains. To address this issue, we propose CAPO (Curriculum Advantage Policy Optimization), an adaptive curriculum mechanism based on advantage signals. The proposed mechanism bootstraps imitation learning with positive-only advantage samples to establish robust foundations, and subsequently introduces negative signals to cultivate discriminative capabilities, thereby improving generalization across complex scenarios. Compatible with diverse optimization methods including GRPO, PPO, RLOO, and Reinforce++, our method consistently achieves stable and significant improvements in mathematical reasoning tasks, and further generalizes effectively to multimodal Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning scenarios, establishing itself as a versatile and robust optimization paradigm.

From Imitation to Discrimination: Toward a Generalized Curriculum Advantage Mechanism Enhancing Cross-Domain Reasoning Tasks

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) have driven progress in GUI automation. However, most existing methods rely on static, one-shot visual inputs and passive perception, lacking the ability to adaptively determine when, whether, and how to observe the interface.
We present GUI-Eyes, a reinforcement learning framework for active visual perception in GUI tasks. To acquire more informative observations, the agent learns to make strategic decisions on both whether and how to invoke visual tools, such as cropping or zooming, within a two-stage reasoning process.
To support this behavior, we introduce a progressive perception strategy that decomposes the decision-making into coarse exploration and fine-grained grounding, coordinated by a two-level policy. In addition, we design a spatially continuous reward function tailored to tool usage, which integrates both location proximity and region overlap to provide dense supervision and alleviate the reward sparsity common in GUI environments.
On the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, GUI-Eyes-3B achieves 44.8\% grounding accuracy using only 3k labeled samples, significantly outperforming both supervised and RL-based baselines. These results highlight that tool-aware active perception, enabled by staged policy reasoning and fine-grained reward feedback, is critical for building robust and data-efficient GUI agents.

GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents

RGB-Thermal (RGBT) tracking aims to exploiting visible and thermal infrared modalities for robust all-weather tracking. However, existing RGBT trackers struggle to resolve modality discrepancies, which poses great challenges for robust feature representation. This limitation hinders effective cross-modal information propagation and fusion, which significantly reduces the tracking accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment framework called CADTrack for RGBT Tracking. To be specific, we first deploy the Mamba-based Feature Interaction (MFI) that establishes efficient feature interaction via state space models. This interaction module can operate with linear complexity, reducing computational cost and improving feature discrimination. Then, we propose the Contextual Aggregation Module (CAM) that dynamically activates backbone layers through sparse gating based on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). This module can encode complementary contextual information from cross-layer features. Finally, we propose the Deformable Alignment Module (DAM) to integrate deformable sampling and temporal propagation, mitigating spatial misalignment and localization drift. With the above components, our CADTrack achieves robust and accurate tracking in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments on five RGBT tracking benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code and model will be released.

CADTrack: Learning Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment for Robust RGBT Tracking

Smartphones bring significant convenience to users but also enable devices to extensively record various types of personal information.
Existing smartphone agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in automating different tasks.
However, as the cost, these agents are granted substantial access to sensitive users' personal information during this operation. 
To gain a thorough understanding of the privacy awareness of these agents, we present the first large-scale benchmark encompassing 7,138 scenarios to the best of our knowledge.
In addition, for privacy context in scenarios, we annotate its type (e.g., Account Credentials), sensitivity level, and location.
We then carefully benchmark seven available mainstream smartphone agents. 
Our results demonstrate that almost all benchmarked agents show unsatisfying privacy awareness (RA), with performance remaining below 60% even with explicit hints. 
Overall, closed-source agents show better privacy ability than open-source ones, and Gemini 2.0-flash achieves the best, achieving an RA of 67%.
We also find that the agents’ privacy detection capability is highly related to scenario sensitivity level, i.e., the scenario with a higher sensitivity level is typically more identifiable. 
We hope the findings enlighten the research community to rethink the unbalanced utility-privacy tradeoff about smartphone agents.

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Priority-Based Graph-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Robust Analog Circuit Optimization

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