Singapore

The Euclidean Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) is a classic problem which requires finding the shortest path in a Euclidean plane with polygonal obstacles. The state-of-the-art solution, Euclidean Hub Labeling (EHL), offers ultra-fast query performance but comes with significant memory overhead, requiring up to tens of gigabytes of storage on large maps, limiting its use in memory-constrained environments like mobile phones. Additionally, EHL&#39;s memory usage can only be determined after index construction, and while it provides a memory-runtime tradeoff, it does not fully optimize memory utilization.
In this work, we introduce an improved version of EHL, called EHL*, which overcomes these limitations. A key contribution of EHL* is its ability to create an index that adheres to a specified memory budget while optimizing query runtime performance. Moreover, EHL* can leverage pre-known query distributions, a common scenario in many real-world applications, to further enhance runtime efficiency. Our results show that EHL* can reduce memory usage by up to 10-20 times without much impact on query runtime performance compared to EHL, making it a highly effective solution for optimal pathfinding in memory-constrained environments.
We also present a theoretical analysis comparing EHL* with EHL, providing insights into their indexing and query processing cost.

AAAI 2026

EHL*: Memory-Budgeted Indexing for Ultrafast Optimal Euclidean Pathfinding

The Euclidean Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) is a classic problem which requires finding the shortest path in a Euclidean plane with polygonal obstacles. The state-of-the-art solution, Euclidean Hub Labeling (EHL), offers ultra-fast query performance but comes with significant memory overhead, requiring up to tens of gigabytes of storage on large maps, limiting its use in memory-constrained environments like mobile phones. Additionally, EHL's memory usage can only be determined after index construction, and while it provides a memory-runtime tradeoff, it does not fully optimize memory utilization.
In this work, we introduce an improved version of EHL, called EHL*, which overcomes these limitations. A key contribution of EHL* is its ability to create an index that adheres to a specified memory budget while optimizing query runtime performance. Moreover, EHL* can leverage pre-known query distributions, a common scenario in many real-world applications, to further enhance runtime efficiency. Our results show that EHL* can reduce memory usage by up to 10-20 times without much impact on query runtime performance compared to EHL, making it a highly effective solution for optimal pathfinding in memory-constrained environments.
We also present a theoretical analysis comparing EHL* with EHL, providing insights into their indexing and query processing cost.

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.

Although recent studies have explored anomaly generation to address the scarcity of anomaly images in real-world data, existing methods typically suffer from at least one of the following limitations, hindering their practical deployment: (1) lack of visual realism in generated anomalies; (2) dependence on large amounts of real images; and (3) use of memory-intensive, heavyweight model architectures. To overcome these limitations, we propose AnoStyler, a lightweight yet effective method that frames zero-shot anomaly generation as text-guided style transfer. Given a single normal image along with its category label and expected defect type, an anomaly mask indicating the localized anomaly regions and two-class text prompts representing the normal and anomaly states are generated using generalizable category-agnostic procedures. A lightweight U-Net model trained with CLIP-based loss functions is used to stylize the normal image into a visually realistic anomaly image, where anomalies are localized by the anomaly mask and semantically aligned with the text prompts. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets show that AnoStyler outperforms existing anomaly generation methods in generating high-quality and diverse anomaly images. Furthermore, using these generated anomalies helps enhance anomaly detection performance.

AnoStyler: Text-Driven Localized Anomaly Generation via Lightweight Style Transfer

Mitigating the negative impact of noisy labels has been a perennial issue in supervised learning.
Robust loss functions have emerged as a prevalent solution to this problem. 
In this work, we introduce the *Variation Ratio* as a novel property related to the robustness of loss functions, and propose a new family of robust loss functions, termed *Variation-Bounded Loss* (VBL), which is characterized by a bounded variation ratio.
We provide theoretical analyses of the variation radio, proving that a smaller variation ratio would lead to better robustness.
Furthermore, we reveal that the variation ratio provides a feasible method
to relax the symmetric condition and offers a more
concise path to achieve the asymmetric condition.
Based on the variation ratio, we reformulate several commonly used loss functions into a variation-bounded form for pract ical applications. 
Positive experiments on various datasets exhibit the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach.

Variation-Bounded Loss for Noise-Tolerant Learning

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) technology has become a frontier of great interest due to the ability to integrate information from multiple sources. However, the progressive slowdown of weight updates in deep networks (i.e., “network laziness” phenomenon), makes existing methods far from realizing the full characterization potential. To this end, we propose a lightweight fusion method for IVIF, Anti-Inert Dynamic Fusion (AIDFusion), to fully utilize the potential of the network at all levels. Specifically, by progressively regulating the collaborative Learning process of multi-level prediction in the network, Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Learning Strategy (DIILS) is proposed to adaptively and efficiently inhibit inertia accumulation. Subsequently, to deeply explore the representation potential while breaking through the performance threshold, lightweight Multi-dimensional modulation fusion module (MMFM) is specifically proposed to capture comprehensive multi-view and multi-scale features efficiently. Finally, considering the semantic bias between the prediction maps of DIILS and the fusion feature of MMFM, Fourier Analysis Convolution (FAConv) is designed in feature recovery as a bridge between prediction and fusion to accomplish the implicit periodic modeling. Based on the above study, extensive experiments on three public IVIF datasets demonstrate the dual advantages of AIDFusion in terms of fusion performance and computational overhead compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Revisiting Network Inertia: Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Coupled Multidimensional Periodicity for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

We propose a method for extracting monosemantic neurons, defined as latent dimensions aligned with coherent and interpretable concepts, from user and item embeddings in recommender systems. Our approach uses a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle semantic structure from pretrained representations. Unlike prior work on language models, monosemanticity in recommendation requires preserving interactions between distinct user and item embeddings. To address this, we introduce a prediction-aware training objective that backpropagates through a frozen recommender, aligning latent structure with affinity behavior. The resulting neurons capture actionable properties, such as genre, popularity, and recency, and enable post hoc control operations like targeted filtering or promotion without modifying the base model. Our method generalizes across recommendation models and datasets, offering a practical tool for interpretable and controllable personalization.

Extracting Interaction-Aware Monosemantic Concepts in Recommender Systems

The honesty of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important for safe deployment in high-stakes domains. However, this crucial trait is severely undermined by supervised fine-tuning (SFT), a common technique for model specialization. Existing recovery methods rely on data-intensive global parameter adjustments, implicitly assuming that SFT deeply corrupts the models' ability to recognize their knowledge boundaries. However, we observe that fine‑tuned LLMs still preserve this ability; what is damaged is their capacity to faithfully express that awareness. Building on this, we propose Honesty-Critical Neurons Restoration (HCNR) to surgically repair this suppressed capacity. HCNR identifies and restores key expression-governing neurons to their pre-trained state while harmonizing them with task-oriented neurons via Hessian-guided compensation. Experiments on four QA tasks and five LLM families demonstrate that HCNR effectively recovers 33.25\% of the compromised honesty while achieving at least 2.23x speedup with over 10x less data compared to baseline methods, offering a practical solution for trustworthy LLM deployment.

Fine-Tuned LLMs Know They Don’t Know: A Parameter-Efficient Approach to Recovering Honesty

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is a research field that recognizes human sentiments by combining textual, visual, and audio modalities. The main challenge lies in integrating sentiment-related information from different modalities, which typically arises during the unimodal feature extraction phase and the multimodal feature fusion phase. Existing methods extract only shallow information from unimodal features during the extraction phase, neglecting sentimental differences across different personalities. During the fusion phase, they directly merge the feature information from each modality without considering differences at the feature level. This ultimately affects the model's recognition performance. To address this problem, we propose a personality-sentiment aligned multi-level fusion framework. We introduce personality traits during the feature extraction phase and propose a novel personality-sentiment alignment method to obtain personalized sentiment embeddings from the textual modality for the first time. In the fusion phase, we introduce a novel multi-level fusion method. This method gradually integrates sentimental information from textual, visual, and audio modalities through multimodal pre-fusion and a multi-level enhanced fusion strategy. Our method has been evaluated through multiple experiments on two commonly used datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PSA-MF: Personality-Sentiment Aligned Multi-Level Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

The human nervous system exhibits bilateral symmetry, enabling coordinated and balanced movements. However, existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods for humanoid robots neglect morphological symmetry of the robot, leading to uncoordinated and suboptimal behaviors. Inspired by human motor control, we propose Symmetry Equivariant Policy (SE-Policy), a new DRL framework that embeds strict symmetry equivariance in the actor and symmetry invariance in the critic without additional hyperparameters. SE-Policy enforces consistent behaviors across symmetric observations, producing temporally and spatially coordinated motions with higher task performance. Extensive experiments on velocity tracking tasks, conducted in both simulation and real-world deployment with the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrate that SE-Policy improves tracking accuracy by up to 40\% compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while achieving superior spatial-temporal coordination. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SE-Policy and its broad applicability to humanoid robots.

Coordinated Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Symmetry Equivariant Reinforcement Learning Policy

In this paper, we study the bias and high-order error bounds of the Linear Stochastic Approximation (LSA) algorithm with Polyak–Ruppert (PR) averaging under Markovian noise. We focus on the version of the algorithm with constant step size $\alpha$ and propose a novel decomposition of the bias via a linearization technique. We analyze the structure of the bias and show that the leading-order term is linear in $\alpha$ and cannot be eliminated by PR averaging. To address this, we apply the Richardson–Romberg (RR) extrapolation procedure, which effectively cancels the leading bias term. We derive high-order moment bounds for the RR iterates and show that the leading error term aligns with the asymptotically optimal covariance matrix of the vanilla averaged LSA iterates.

High-Order Error Bounds for Markovian LSA with Richardson–Romberg Extrapolation

While large language models (LLMs) have shown progress in mathematical reasoning, they still face challenges in formalizing theorems that arise from instantiating abstract structures in concrete settings. With the goal of auto-formalizing mathematical results at the research level, we develop a framework for structure-to-instance theorem autoformalization (SITA), which systematically bridges the gap between abstract mathematical theories and their concrete applications in Lean proof assistant. Formalized abstract structures are treated as modular templates that contain definitions, assumptions, operations, and theorems. These templates serve as reusable guides for the formalization of concrete instances. Given a specific instantiation, we generate corresponding Lean definitions and instance declarations, integrate them using Lean’s typeclass mechanism, and construct verified theorems by checking structural assumptions. We incorporate LLM-based generation with feedback-guided refinement to ensure both automation and formal correctness. Experiments on a dataset of optimization problems demonstrate that SITA effectively formalizes diverse instances grounded in abstract structures.

SITA: A Framework for Structure-to-Instance Theorem Autoformalization

Multimodal table understanding, which aims for a comprehensive grasp of table content by integrating cellular text, tabular structure, and visual presentation, remains a core yet challenging area of research.
We identify that the structural complexity of a table, quantifiable by intrinsic properties such as the ratio of merged cells and the total number of cells, presents a significant obstacle for existing models. 
Our empirical analysis reveals that the performance of leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deteriorates markedly as table complexity increases, exposing a critical vulnerability in their ability to perceive and reason over intricate tabular data.
To address this challenge, we propose MM-Table-R1, a model enhanced through difficulty-aware reinforcement learning (RL) post-training strategy. 
Specifically, we introduce both task-level and data-level curriculum learning. 
The task-level curriculum is designed to establish a capability ladder, where the model first learns basic perceptual and semantic alignment of table data, and then progresses to acquiring multi-step reasoning capabilities.
The data-level curriculum ensures that the model is not exposed to difficult samples prematurely, facilitating a more gradual and effective learning process.
Furthermore, we invest considerable effort in constructing a high-quality, large-scale training corpus by curating and processing data from diverse open-source table datasets, ensuring that each instance is paired with an objectively verifiable reward signal.
Demonstrating exceptional parameter efficiency, our 3B-parameter model sets a new benchmark by surpassing both established 3B and 7B models, including those specifically designed for table reasoning.

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AnoStyler: Text-Driven Localized Anomaly Generation via Lightweight Style Transfer

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