Singapore

Finding the optimal configuration of Sparse Mixture-of- Experts (SMoE) that maximizes semantic differentiation among experts is essential for exploiting the full potential of MoE architectures. However, existing SMoE frameworks either heavily rely on hyperparameter tuning or overlook the importance of diversifying semantic roles across experts when adapting the expert pool size. We propose Mixture-of-Experts for Adaptive Semantic Specialization (MASS), a semantic- aware MoE framework for adaptive expert expansion and dy- namic routing. MASS introduces two key advancements: (1) a gradient-based semantic drift detector that prompts targeted expert expansion when the existing expert pool lacks capacity to capture the full semantic diversity of the data, and (2) a novel routing strategy that dynamically adjusts expert usage based on token-level routing confidence mass. We first demon- strate that MASS reliably converges to the point of optimal balance between cost-performance trade-off with notably im- proved sematic specialization in a highly controlled synthetic setup. Further empirical results on real-world datasets across language and vision domains show that MASS consistently outperforms a range of strong MoE baselines, demonstrating its domain robustness and enhanced expert specialization.

AAAI 2026

How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts

ml: mixture of experts (moe)

nlp: (large) language models

ml: deep learning algorithms

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.

poster

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels at real-time rendering of standard scenes, it struggles to reconstruct underwater environments due to severe challenges such as light scattering, color attenuation, and sparse coverage of Gaussian kernels in far-field aqueous regions. To address this, we introduce \textit{AquaSplatting}, a hybrid framework that combines explicit and implicit modeling methods for robust underwater scene reconstruction. Our dual-branch architecture employs 3DGS in a geometry-guided branch to model solid surfaces like the seabed, while a medium-aware branch uses a compact, view-dependent MLP to represent volumetric water effects. Furthermore, a neural underwater hybrid rendering mechanism adaptively fuses these two representations based on accumulated opacity. Thanks to this dual-branch framework, our method can also synthesize restored images without water medium. To enhance efficiency, our proposed engagement-based pruning (EBP) strategy quantifies each Gaussian's contribution by accumulating its image-space gradients over multiple frames, enabling the principled removal of primitives with negligible impact. The entire framework is optimized using a comprehensive loss function that integrates photometric, exposure, semantic, and depth priors to maximize visual fidelity. Experiments on challenging underwater datasets demonstrate that AquaSplatting achieves the state-of-the-art in reconstruction quality surpassing prior methods while maintaining real-time performance.

AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering

Speech-to-Speech (S2S) Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to natural human-computer interaction, enabling end-to-end spoken dialogue systems. 
However, evaluating these models remains a fundamental challenge. 
We propose *SageLM*, an end-to-end, multi-aspect, and explainable speech LLM for comprehensive S2S LLMs evaluation. 
First, unlike cascaded approaches that disregard acoustic features, SageLM jointly assesses both semantic and acoustic dimensions. 
Second, it leverages rationale-based supervision to enhance explainability and guide model learning, achieving superior alignment with evaluation outcomes compared to rule-based reinforcement learning methods. 
Third, we introduce *SpeechFeedback*, a synthetic preference dataset, and employ a two-stage training paradigm to mitigate the scarcity of speech preference data. 
Trained on both semantic and acoustic dimensions, SageLM achieves an 82.79\% agreement rate with human evaluators, outperforming cascaded and SLM-based baselines by at least 7.42\% and 26.20\%, respectively.

SageLM: A Multi-aspect and Explainable Large Language Model for Speech Judgement

Noisy correspondence in cross-modal retrieval introduces significant challenges due to its inherent difficulty in identification and correction. Although existing methods attempt to minimize the influence of noisy samples by the weighting mechanism, these methods still struggle with performance degradation under increasing noise levels. Specifically, the clean samples are assigned the same weight of 1, which ignores the sample hardness. In addition, the weights for noisy samples are approaching 0, leading to the overlook of sample diversity. To address these issues, we propose a Hardness and Noise-aware (HaNa) robust cross-modal retrieval method. HaNa introduces a momentum-based reweighting mechanism to adaptively balance learning difficulty across clean samples, avoiding overfitting risk and accumulative partitioning bias. Moreover, HaNa addresses the limitation that weights for noisy data are approaching 0 from a new perspective to fully employ the diversity of samples to further improve its generalization. It employs an Asymmetric Noise-aware Regularization Loss (ANRL) to treat identified noisy data as negative samples for optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HaNa achieves superior matching accuracy and stability, especially in high-noise scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

HaNa: Hardness and Noise-Aware Robust Cross-modal Retrieval

Realistic choreography demands simultaneous attention to rhythm and motivation. Prevailing automated dance gener-
ation methods mainly depend on musical input, overlooking the motivations that drive meaningful dance creation.
Inspired by the motivation choreography, we aim to articulate dance motivations through textual guidance. However,
the absence of high-quality datasets concurrently containing music, textual descriptions, and motion data presents a
challenge in achieving accurate fine-grained textual control. To address this limitation, we present MotivDance, a novel
framework integrating fine-grained textual guidance with music to synthesize semantically coherent dance sequences. Our
approach first synthesizes text-guided key poses as motivations. We then introduce an Adaptive Keyframe Locator that
dynamically positions these motivations within the musical context through beat-aware synchronization and cross-modal
latent space alignment. Finally, a Transformer-based U-Net diffusion model performs the motion in-betweening while
preserving motivational integrity. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that MotivDance effec-
tively integrates music with fine-grained text control to generate high-fidelity dance motions.

MotivDance: Fine-Grained Text-Guided Motivation Choreography with Music Synchronization

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for 3D scenes, widely adopted due to its exceptional efficiency and high-fidelity visual quality. Given the significant value of 3DGS assets, recent works have introduced specialized watermarking schemes to ensure copyright protection and ownership verification. However, can existing 3D Gaussian watermarking approaches genuinely guarantee robust protection of the 3D assets? In this paper, for the first time, we systematically explore and validate possible vulnerabilities of 3DGS watermarking frameworks. We demonstrate that conventional watermark removal techniques designed for 2D images do not effectively generalize to the 3DGS scenario due to the specialized rendering pipeline and unique attributes of each gaussian primitives. Motivated by this insight, we propose GSPure, the first watermark purification framework specifically for 3DGS watermarking representations. By analyzing view-dependent rendering contributions and exploiting geometrically accurate feature clustering, GSPure precisely isolates and effectively removes watermark-related Gaussian primitives while preserving scene integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GSPure achieves the best watermark purification performance, reducing watermark PSNR by up to 16.34dB while minimizing degradation to original scene fidelity with less than 1dB PSNR loss. Moreover, it consistently outperforms existing methods in both effectiveness and generalization.

Can Protective Watermarking Safeguard the Copyright of 3D Gaussian Splatting?

Large vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous driving (AD) are evolving beyond perception and cognition tasks toward motion planning. However, we identify two critical challenges in this direction: (1) VLMs tend to learn shortcuts by relying heavily on history input information, achieving seemingly strong planning results without genuinely understanding the visual inputs; and (2) the chain-of-thought (COT) reasoning processes are always misaligned with the motion planning outcomes, and how to effectively leverage the complex reasoning capability to enhance planning remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we start from a small-scale domain-specific VLM and propose **Drive-R1**, designed to bridge the scenario reasoning and motion planning for AD. **Drive-R1** first undergoes the supervised finetuning on an elaborate dataset containing both long and short COT data. **Drive-R1** is encouraged to reason step-by-step from visual input to final planning decisions. Subsequently, **Drive-R1** is trained within a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the discovery of reasoning paths that are more informative for planning, guided by rewards based on predicted trajectories and meta actions. Experimental evaluations on the nuScenes and DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that **Drive-R1** achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art VLMs. We believe that **Drive-R1**presents a promising direction for bridging reasoning and planning in AD, offering methodological insights for future research and applications.

Drive-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Planning in VLMs for Autonomous Driving with Reinforcement Learning

Self-supervised graph representation learning (GRL) typically generates paired graph augmentations from each graph to infer similar representations for augmentations of the same graph, but distinguishable representations for different graphs. While effective augmentation requires both semantics-preservation and dataperturbation, most existing GRL methods focus solely on data-perturbation, leading to suboptimal solutions. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a novel method, Explanation-Preserving Augmentation (EPA), which leverages graph explanation for semantics-preservation. EPA first uses a small number of labels to train a graph explainer, which infers the subgraphs that explain the graph’s label. Then these explanations are used for generating semantics-preserving augmentations for boosting self-supervised GRL. Thus, the entire process, namely EPA-GRL, is semi-supervised. We demonstrate theoretically, using an analytical example, and through extensive experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, that EPA-GRL outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) GRL methods with semantics-agnostic augmentations.

Explanation-Preserving Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Representation Learning

3D full-scene segmentation technology has demonstrated great potential driven by large models, but it often faces challenges of incomplete scenes and identification of invisible classes in practical applications. To address this, we propose the LR-AdaInSeg method, which significantly enhances the model’s generalization ability in incomplete scenes through two key innovations: First, we design a Bayesian Low-Rank Module, which effectively solves the problem of feature space redundancy through dynamic optimization of the network structure, improving adaptability to incomplete scenes. Second, we combine graph contrastive clustering with the Low-Rank module, leveraging its robust feature representation capability to achieve accurate differentiation of invisible classes. In terms of implementation, we build a multi-scale feature extraction framework based on the 3D U-Net and utilize the 3D prompt points and their 2D masks as supervisory signals to achieve effective fusion of geometric and semantic information. Experiments show that our method achieves advanced performance on multiple benchmarks such as ScanNet, particularly excelling in handling incomplete scenes and invisible class objects.

LR-AdaInSeg:Adaptive Instance Segmentation of Incomplete 3D Scenes Driven by Low-Rank Networks

Noisy correspondence, characterized by mismatches in cross-modal data pairs, presents a significant challenge for real-world applications. Current approaches primarily rely on direct cross-modal pairwise similarity metrics, which suffer from two critical limitations: noise sensitivity, where direct similarity calculations are easily corrupted by noisy or ambiguous instances, and contextual blindness, where isolated pairwise comparisons fail to exploit the rich semantic context embedded in neighboring instances. To address this issue, we propose to improve noise correspondence discrimination through a well-designed \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{N}eighborhood \textbf{S}emantic association verification paradigm, namely \textit{\textbf{DNS}}. Specifically, we hypothesize that the matching degree of current samples can be quantified through the interrelationships among their respective semantic neighbors. For this reason, we develop a novel semantic drift distance and local relation proximity based on dynamic neighborhood association. Furthermore, beyond implicit approaches to semantic gap modeling in cross-modal data, we introduce an explicit decomposition framework that disentangles the gap into the semantic orientation and scalar magnitude. Through the strategic integration of these proposed mechanisms, \textit{\textbf{DNS}} achieves substantial enhancement in noisy correspondence discrimination, yielding remarkable performance gains. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions, demonstrate the superiority of \textit{\textbf{DNS}} over state-of-the-art methods.

Boosting Noisy Correspondence Discrimination via Dynamic Neighborhood Semantic Verification

Large language models (LLMs) perform in-context learning (ICL) with minimal supervised examples, which benefits various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. One of the critical research focus is the selection of prompt demonstrations. Current approaches typically employ retrieval models to select the top-K most semantically similar examples as demonstrations. However, we argue that existing methods are limited since the label consistency is not guaranteed during demonstration selection. Our cognition derives from the Bayesian view of ICL and our rethinking of ICL from the transductive label propagation perspective. We treat ICL as a transductive learning method and incorporate latent concepts from Bayesian view and deduce that similar demonstrations guide the concepts of query, with consistent labels serving as estimates. Based on this understanding, we establish a label propagation framework to link label consistency with propagation error bounds. To model label consistency, we propose a data synthesis method, leveraging both semantic and label information, and use TopK sampling with Synthetic Data (TopK-SD) to acquire demonstrations with consistent labels. TopK-SD outperforms original TopK sampling on multiple benchmarks. Our work provides a new perspective for understanding the working mechanisms within ICL.

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AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering

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Next from AAAI 2026

AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering

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On the Impact of Expert Count in Mixture of Experts

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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RESOURCES

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