Singapore

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approaches like Meta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) can learn, from few examples, recursive logic programs with invented predicates that generalise well to unseen instances. This ability relies on a background theory and negative examples, both carefully selected with expert knowledge of a learning problem and its solutions. But what if such a problem-specific background theory or negative examples are not available? We formalise this question as a new setting for Self-Supervised ILP and present a new MIL algorithm that learns in the new setting from some positive labelled, and zero or more unlabelled examples, and automatically generates, and labels, new positive and negative examples during learning. We implement this algorithm in Prolog in a new MIL system, called Poker. We compare Poker to state-of-the-art MIL system Louise on experiments learning grammars for Context-Free and L-System languages from labelled, positive example strings, no negative examples, and just the terminal vocabulary of a language, seen in examples, as a first-order background theory. We introduce a new approach for the principled selection of a second-order background theory as a Second Order Definite Normal Form (SONF), sufficiently general to learn all programs in a class, thus removing the need for a backgound theory tailored to a learning task. We find that Poker&#39;s performance improves with increasing numbers of automatically generated examples while Louise, bereft of negative examples, over-generalises.

AAAI 2026

Self-Supervised Inductive Logic Programming

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approaches like Meta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) can learn, from few examples, recursive logic programs with invented predicates that generalise well to unseen instances. This ability relies on a background theory and negative examples, both carefully selected with expert knowledge of a learning problem and its solutions. But what if such a problem-specific background theory or negative examples are not available? We formalise this question as a new setting for Self-Supervised ILP and present a new MIL algorithm that learns in the new setting from some positive labelled, and zero or more unlabelled examples, and automatically generates, and labels, new positive and negative examples during learning. We implement this algorithm in Prolog in a new MIL system, called Poker. We compare Poker to state-of-the-art MIL system Louise on experiments learning grammars for Context-Free and L-System languages from labelled, positive example strings, no negative examples, and just the terminal vocabulary of a language, seen in examples, as a first-order background theory. We introduce a new approach for the principled selection of a second-order background theory as a Second Order Definite Normal Form (SONF), sufficiently general to learn all programs in a class, thus removing the need for a backgound theory tailored to a learning task. We find that Poker's performance improves with increasing numbers of automatically generated examples while Louise, bereft of negative examples, over-generalises.

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>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

Automated polyp segmentation in colonoscopy videos is an essential computer-aided technology for early detection and removal of polyps. However, most video polyp segmentation methods are designed with pixel-level temporal learning mechanisms, at the cost of time-consuming frame-wise annotations. In this paper, we present VPSentry, a novel semi-supervised segmentation model with a sentry mechanism. Our model integrates a prototype memory to store the long-term spatiotemporal cues of colonoscopy videos. Moreover, we devise adaptive prototypes to capture and generalize critical representations from individual frames, enabling long-term temporal fusion across labeled and unlabeled frames. In addition, we propose a correlation dynamic propagation module that propagates information from prototypes to features while simultaneously extracting dynamic features to perceive variations in polyp details between adjacent frames. Since colonoscopy scenes may change among consecutive frames, we further employ a sentry mechanism to assess the inter-frame continuity. This mechanism guides the prototype memory updating and the correlation dynamic propagation, further facilitating robust temporal propagation and dynamic detail perception for semi-supervised learning of long-term colonoscopy video sequences. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SUN-SEG dataset demonstrate that our model achieves optimal segmentation performance with real-time inference efficiency. Codes will be released upon publication.

VPSentry: Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Sentry-guided Long-term Prototype Fusion with Correlation Dynamic Propagation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, they exhibit certain cognitive patterns similar to those of humans that are not directly specified in training data. This study investigates this phenomenon by focusing on temporal cognition in LLMs. Leveraging the similarity judgment task, we find that larger models spontaneously establish a subjective temporal reference point and adhere to the Weber-Fechner law, whereby the perceived distance logarithmically compresses as years recede from this reference point. To uncover the mechanisms behind this behavior, we conducted multiple analyses across neuronal, representational, and informational levels. We first identify a set of temporal-preferential neurons and find that this group exhibits minimal activation at the subjective reference point and implements a logarithmic coding scheme convergently found in biological systems. Probing representations of years reveals a hierarchical construction process, where years evolve from basic numerical values in shallow layers to abstract temporal orientation in deep layers. Finally, using pre-trained embedding models, we found that the training corpus itself possesses an inherent, non-linear temporal structure, which provides the raw material for the model's internal construction. In discussion, we propose an experientialist perspective for understanding these findings, where the LLMs' cognition is viewed as a subjective construction of the external world by its internal representational system. This nuanced perspective implies the potential emergence of alien cognitive frameworks that humans cannot intuitively predict, pointing toward a direction for AI alignment that focuses on guiding internal constructions.

The Other Mind: How Language Models Exhibit Human Temporal Cognition

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual signals. Although multimodal fusion is designed to leverage cross-modal complementarity, real-world scenarios often exhibit modality competition: dominant modalities tend to overshadow weaker ones, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PaSE, a novel Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-optimized Equilibrium framework, which enhances collaboration while explicitly mitigating modality competition. PaSE first applies Prototype-guided Calibration Learning (PCL) to refine unimodal representations and align them through an Entropic Optimal Transport mechanism that ensures semantic consistency. To further stabilize optimization, we introduce a Dual-Phase Optimization strategy. A prototype-gated fusion module is first used to extract shared representations, followed by Shapley-based Gradient Modulation (SGM), which adaptively adjusts gradients according to the contribution of each modality. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MOSEI confirm that PaSE achieves the superior performance and effectively alleviates modality competition.

PaSE: Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-based Equilibrium for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Protein–ligand binding prediction is central to virtual screening and affinity ranking, two fundamental tasks in drug discovery. While recent retrieval-based methods embed ligands and protein pockets into Euclidean space for similarity-based search, the geometry of Euclidean embeddings often fails to capture the hierarchical structure and fine-grained affinity variations intrinsic to molecular interactions. In this work, we propose HypSeek, a hyperbolic representation learning framework that embeds ligands, protein pockets, and sequences into Lorentz-model hyperbolic space. By leveraging the exponential geometry and negative curvature of hyperbolic space, HypSeek enables expressive, affinity-sensitive embeddings that can effectively model both global activity and subtle functional differences—particularly in challenging cases such as activity cliffs, where structurally similar ligands exhibit large affinity gaps. Our mode unifies virtual screening and affinity ranking in a single framework, introducing a protein-guided three-tower architecture to enhance representational structure. HypSeek improves early enrichment in virtual screening on DUD-E from 42.63 to 51.44 (+20.7\%) and affinity ranking correlation on JACS from 0.5774 to 0.7239 (+25.3\%), demonstrating the benefits of hyperbolic geometry across both tasks and highlighting its potential as a powerful inductive bias for protein–ligand modeling.

Learning Protein–Ligand Binding in Hyperbolic Space

In an ideal medical environment, real-time coagulation monitoring can enable early detection and prompt remediation of risks. However, traditional Thromboelastography (TEG), a widely employed diagnostic modality, can only provide such outputs after nearly 1 hour of measurement. The delay might lead to elevated mortality rates. These issues clearly point out one of the key challenges for medical AI development: Making reasonable predictions based on very small data sets and accounting for variation between different patient populations, a task where conventional deep learning methods typically perform poorly. We present Physiological State Reconstruction (PSR), a new algorithm specifically designed to take advantage of dynamic changes between individuals and to maximize useful information produced by small amounts of clinical data through mapping to reliable predictions and diagnosis. We develop MDFE to facilitate integration of varied temporal signals using multi-domain learning, and jointly learn high-level temporal interactions together with attentions via HLA; furthermore, the parameterized DAM we designed maintains the stability of the computed vital signs. PSR evaluates with 4 TEG-specialized data sets and establishes remarkable performance -- predictions of R^2 > 0.98 for coagulation traits and error reduction around half compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and halving the inferencing time too. Drift-aware learning suggests a new future, with potential uses well beyond thrombophilia discovery towards medical AI applications with data scarcity.

Neural Architecture for Fast and Reliable Coagulation Assessment in Clinical Settings: Leveraging Thromboelastography

Parameter-Efficient finetuning (PEFT) enhances model performance on downstream tasks by updating a minimal subset of parameters. Representation finetuning (ReFT) methods further improve efficiency by freezing model weights and optimizing internal representations with fewer parameters than PEFT, outperforming PEFT on several tasks. However, ReFT exhibits a significant performance decline on mathematical reasoning tasks. To address this problem, the paper demonstrates that ReFT's poor performance on mathematical tasks primarily stems from its struggle to generate effective reasoning prefixes during the early inference phase. Moreover, ReFT disturbs the numerical encoding and the error accumulats during the CoT stage. Based on these observations, this paper proposes Bias-REstrained Prefix Representation FineTuning (BREP ReFT), which enhances ReFT's mathematical reasoning capability by truncating training data to optimize the generation of initial reasoning prefixes, intervening on the early inference stage to prevent error accumulation, and constraining the intervention vectors' magnitude to avoid disturbing numerical encoding. Extensive experiments across diverse model architectures demonstrate BREP's superior effectiveness, efficiency, and robust generalization capability, outperforming both standard ReFT and weight-based PEFT methods on the task of mathematical reasoning.

Bias-Restrained Prefix Representation Finetuning for Mathematical Reasoning

Prompt-based offline methods are commonly used to optimize large language model (LLM) responses, but evaluating these responses is computationally intensive and often fails to accommodate diverse response styles. This study introduces a novel online evaluation framework that employs a multi-agent conversational bandit model to select optimal responses while aligning with user preferences dynamically.
To tackle challenges such as high-dimensional features, large response sets, adaptive conversational needs, and multi-device access, we propose MACO, Multi-Agent Conversational Online Learning, which comprises two key components: (1) \texttt{MACO-A}: Executed by local agents, it employs an online elimination mechanism to filter out low-quality responses.
(2) \texttt{MACO-S}: Executed by the cloud server, it adaptively adjusts selection strategies based on aggregated preference data. An adaptive preference mechanism triggers asynchronous conversations to enhance alignment efficiency. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that MACO achieves near-optimal regret bounds, matching state-of-the-art performance in various degenerate cases. 
Extensive experiments utilizing Google and OpenAI text embedding models on the real-world datasets with different response styles, combined with Llama and GPT-4o, show that MACO consistently outperforms baseline methods by at least 8.29\% across varying response set sizes and numbers of agents.

A Multi-Agent Conversational Bandit Approach to Online Evaluation and Selection of User-Aligned LLM Responses

Diffusion policies have recently shown great promise for generating actions in robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches often rely on global instructions to produce short-term control signals, which can result in misalignment in action generation. We conjecture that the primitive skills, referred to as fine-grained, short-horizon manipulations, such as "move up" and "open the gripper", provide a more intuitive and effective interface for robot learning. To bridge this gap, we propose SDP, a skill-conditioned diffusion policy that integrates interpretable skill learning with conditional action planning. SDP abstracts eight reusable primitive skills across tasks and employs a vision-language model to extract discrete representations from visual observations and language instructions. Based on the representations, a lightweight router network is designed to assign a desired primitive skill for each state, which helps construct a single-skill policy to generate skill-aligned actions. By decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of primitive skills and selecting a single-skill policy, the proposed SDP ensures skill-consistent behavior across diverse tasks.
Extensive experiments on two challenging simulation benchmarks and real-world robot deployments demonstrate that SDP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing a new paradigm for skill-based robot learning with diffusion policies.

Learning Diffusion Policy from Primitive Skills for Robot Manipulation

Machine learning methods have been increasingly applied to solve Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). A high-efficiency approach is to learn solution construction using deep neural networks. However, their tendency toward premature convergence is a critical barrier, severely hindering generalization across diverse distributions and scales. To overcome this, we introduce Elite-Pattern Reinforcement (EPR), a novel strategy designed to create a synergy between the diverse, exploratory nature of reinforcement learning and the high-quality, structured knowledge from classical heuristics. The strategy guides the learning process by reinforcing structural patterns from elite solutions, employing an elite-guided score modulation to integrate this external knowledge. The inherent symmetry of path patterns is also exploited to augment the structural information. This steers the policy away from premature convergence by enabling it to distinguish and favour elite path patterns over inferior ones. Integrating our strategy with four construction methods yields substantial performance improvements on the CVRPLIB and TSPLIB benchmarks. Furthermore, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based methods, demonstrating superior generalization across diverse distributions and scales.

Elite Pattern Reinforcement for Vehicle Routing Problems

Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

VPSentry: Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Sentry-guided Long-term Prototype Fusion with Correlation Dynamic Propagation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

VPSentry: Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Sentry-guided Long-term Prototype Fusion with Correlation Dynamic Propagation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads