Singapore

Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience, make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team decision-support tool designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to facilitate further research in this field.

AAAI 2026

RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

nlp: applications

app: natural sciences

mas: applications

The Inter-University Big Data Challenge (IUBDC) is an inquiry-driven experiential learning program that invites graduate and undergraduate students from across the country to strengthen their problem-solving and critical thinking skills while gaining familiarity with the fundamentals of data science. The IUBDC fosters scientific inquiry, pioneering thinking, and a solution-focused mindset to drive innovative ideas in the field of the challenges’ topics.

Leveraging Open Data Analytics And Machine Learning To Improve Diagnosis Of Rare Diseases, Patients’ Care And Support

National Inter-University Big Data And AI Challenge 2023 - 

Please find student Open Data and computational science and machine learning finalist projects that are sustainable by design to enhance our understanding of rare diseases, help people affected by the disease to adapt to their lifestyle and reduce their risk of suffering from the disease.

technical paper

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.

Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of human-robot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain (OOD) generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization. To the best of our knowledge, Affordance-R1 is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with reasoning into affordance reasoning. The code of our method and our dataset will be publicly released soon.

Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multiplex graphs are widely used to model multi-relational complex systems and play an important role in various real-world scenarios, such as financial systems and social networks. Hence, detecting anomalous samples in multiplex graph becomes crucial to ensure cybersecurity and stability. Although existing homogeneous graph anomaly detection (GAD) methods can be applied to deal with multiplex graphs, they still face two major challenges: 1) Due to the multiplicity and complexity of relations in multiplex graphs, homogeneous GAD models fail to effectively capture anomalous behaviors that correlate with diverse relational patterns. 2) In real-world applications, malicious entities usually disguise themselves through various camouflage strategies, making it difficult to capture subtle anomalous features via single-relation analysis. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method for multiplex graphs based on Similarity-constrained Fusion Graph Autoencoder (SFGA). In SFGA, we design a multiplex graph autoencoder and introduced a cross-plex attention module at the model bottleneck to achieve comprehensive modeling of cross-relation anomaly patterns. Then, a similarity balancing strategy is proposed to constrain node representations at the bottleneck from both local and global perspectives, enhancing the discriminative power against camouflaged anomalies of autoencoder and enabling more effective identification of anomalous nodes with overlapping or deceptive patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets at varying scales, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.

SFGA: Similarity-Constrained Fusion Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Multiplex Graphs

Linear models are widely used in high-stakes decision-making due to their simplicity and interpretability. Yet when fairness constraints such as demographic parity are introduced, their effects on model coefficients, and thus on how predictive bias is distributed across features, remain opaque. Existing approaches on linear models often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions, or overlook the explicit role of the sensitive attribute, limiting their practical utility for fairness assessment.
We extend the work of Chzhen and Schreuder (2022) and Fukuchi and Sakuma (2023) by proposing a post-processing framework that can be applied on top of any linear model to decompose the resulting bias into direct (sensitive-attribute) and indirect (correlated-features) components. Our method analytically characterizes how demographic parity reshapes each model coefficient, including those of both sensitive and non-sensitive features. This enables a transparent, feature-level interpretation of fairness interventions and reveals how bias may persist or shift through correlated variables.
Our framework requires no model retraining and provides actionable insights for model auditing and mitigation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method captures fairness dynamics missed by prior work, offering a practical and interpretable tool for responsible deployment of linear models.

Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models Under Demographic Parity Constraint

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval---the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm---should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5-18 F₁), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 pp and cuts misleading-context overrides by -29.3 pp, while adding only 0.3 % parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

Seeing through the Conﬂict: Transparent Knowledge Conﬂict Handling in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Leveraging social homophily to enhance user preference modeling, social recommendation has become a cornerstone of modern recommender systems. However, the raw social network contains inherent unreliability as it teems with noise---misclicks, bot-generated and transient ties---while many meaningful links remain unobserved. In this study, we propose DRSoRec, a dual-rectification model to rectify the raw social networks by simultaneously removing noisy signals and preserving useful information. Specifically, the invariant social rationale discovery module distills each user's influential core social circle of the current recommendation, whereas the adaptive social connection refinement module employs a mixture-of-experts structure learner to prune spurious edges and uncover latent links. A contrastive optimization objective is designed to align and mutually enhance these two modules, and the refined user representations are fused with collaborative representations generated from interactions for the final recommendation. Experiments on three public datasets confirm that DRSoRec consistently gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

DRSoRec: Dual-Rectification of Social Networks for Recommendation

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) seeks to decode human emotions by integrating heterogeneous modalities. However, real-world scenarios often involve missing or misaligned data due to sensor failures or transmission errors, leading to disrupted temporal dynamics and degraded cross-modal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose RECAP (Recovery of Coherent Affective Patterns), a robust two-stage framework to restore temporal and structural emotional integrity under modality incompleteness. The first stage employs a causality-aware adversarial generator for multi-granularity temporal reconstruction, complemented by a contrastive mutual information factorization module that disentangles shared and modality-specific semantics. The second stage introduces a mutual information-guided attention fusion mechanism with a ranking-based objective, enabling adaptive integration of complementary signals for refined prediction. Extensive experiments on MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS under various missing-modality conditions demonstrate that RECAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it achieves gains of +2.71\% in Acc-7 on MOSI, and +4.05\% in Acc-3 and +6.38\% in F1 on SIMS. These results verify the performance of RECAP in terms of capturing fine-grained emotional cues and robustness.

Recovering Coherent Affective Patterns: Addressing Modality Missing in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Consensus decision-making uses crowd responses (usually non-experts) to questions to reach a consensus answer based on human-machine collaboration. The crucial point is dynamic, which should not only enable rapid self-iteration toward the correct answer through crowd workers' responses but also adaptively suggest the next most valuable question(s) to speed up the answer integration. However, existing methods reach consensus answers based on either offline data or fixed search structures of questions, where the dynamic nature is largely left aside. In response, we propose a bilevel optimization-based human-machine collaboration (BiO-HMC), which explores an *inner* \& *outer-level* optimization to enable effective answer integration and efficient question selection. The resulting optimization problem is intractable because there is no closed form expression in the *inner-level* optimization. We employ a gradient-based method and guarantee the method's theoretical convergence. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the BiO-HMC model, i.e., achieving the highest confidence in the correct answer with the lowest labor cost.

BiO-HMC: Dynamic Human-Machine Collaboration for Consensus Decision-Making via Bilevel Optimization

The restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) framework is a popular model with applications across a wide variety of fields. However, its solution is hindered by the exponentially growing state space (with respect to the number of arms) and the combinatorial action space, making traditional reinforcement learning methods infeasible for large-scale instances. In this paper, we propose GINO-Q, a three-timescale stochastic approximation algorithm designed to learn an asymptotically optimal index policy for RMABs. GINO-Q mitigates the curse of dimensionality by decomposing the RMAB into a series of subproblems, each with the same dimension as a single arm, ensuring that complexity increases linearly with the number of arms. Unlike recently developed Whittle-index-based algorithms, GINO-Q does not require RMABs to be indexable, enhancing its flexibility and applicability. Our experimental results demonstrate that GINO-Q consistently learns near-optimal policies, even for non-indexable RMABs where Whittle-index-based algorithms perform poorly, and it converges significantly faster than existing baselines.

GINO-Q: Learning an Asymptotically Optimal Index Policy for Restless Multi-armed Bandits

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that bypass safety guidelines and generate harmful content. Mitigating these vulnerabilities requires defense mechanisms that are both robust and computationally efficient. However, existing approaches either incur high computational costs or rely on lightweight defenses that can be easily circumvented, rendering them impractical for real-world LLM-based systems. In this work, we introduce the AlignTree defense, which enhances model alignment while maintaining minimal computational overhead. AlignTree monitors LLM activations during generation and detects misaligned behavior using an efficient random forest classifier. This classifier operates on two signals: (i) the refusal direction - a linear representation that activates on misaligned prompts, and (ii) an SVM-based signal that captures non-linear features associated with harmful content. Unlike previous methods, AlignTree does not require additional prompts or auxiliary guard models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of AlignTree across multiple LLMs and benchmarks.

AlignTree: Efficient Defense Against LLM Jailbreak Attacks

Humanoid robots are expected to operate reliably over long horizons while executing versatile whole-body skills.
Yet Reinforcement Learning (RL) motion policies typically lose stability under prolonged operation, sensor/actuator noise, and real world disturbances.
In this work, we propose a Selective Adversarial Attack for Robust Training (SA2RT) to enhance the robustness of motion skills.
The adversary is learned to identify and sparsely perturb the most vulnerable states and actions under an attack-budget constraint, thereby exposing true weakness without inducing conservative overfitting.
The resulting non-zero sum, alternating optimization continually strengthens the motion policy against the strongest discovered attacks.
We validate our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot across perceptive locomotion and whole-body control tasks.
Experimental results show that adversarially trained policies improve the terrain traversal success rate by 40\%, reduce the trajectory tracking error by 32\%, and maintain long horizon mobility and tracking performance.
Together, these results demonstrate that selective adversarial attacks are an effective driver for learning robust, long horizon humanoid motion skills.

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Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

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Next from AAAI 2026

Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

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Diagnosis Assistant: A Web-Based Application for Assisting in Diagnosing Rare Diseases

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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