Singapore

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across various applications, yet their computational complexity poses significant scalability challenges. In contrast, structure-agnostic Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) offer computational efficiency and scalability but traditionally struggle with explicit graph data. To leverage the strengths of both, GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods transfer relational inductive biases from GNNs to MLPs, equipping MLPs with graph-aware capabilities rivaling or even surpassing their teacher GNNs. In this paper, we theoretically answer how knowledge distillation unlocks MLPs’ potential for graph tasks from the perspective of training dynamics, demonstrating that label alignment in KD fundamentally reshapes the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix of student MLPs to enable them to learn the teacher model&#39;s implicit graph bias. We further investigate finer-grained distillation paradigms, and reveal that conventional layer-wise output alignment fails to effectively align deep-layer graph propagation outcomes. To address this, we propose Dual-Stream Aligned MLP (DA-MLP), which incorporates complementary graph filters in a dual-stream architecture to simultaneously enhance feature space dimensionality for improved represenation alignment while preserving graph signals across different frequency bands. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate that DA-MLP can be seamlessly integrated into existing knowledge distillation frameworks and consistently demonstrates performance enhancements in both transductive and inductive settings.

AAAI 2026

Demystifying GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Transfer: Theoretical Grounding and Dual-Stream Distillation Method

social network analysis & community

graph mining

graph-based machine learning

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across various applications, yet their computational complexity poses significant scalability challenges. In contrast, structure-agnostic Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) offer computational efficiency and scalability but traditionally struggle with explicit graph data. To leverage the strengths of both, GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods transfer relational inductive biases from GNNs to MLPs, equipping MLPs with graph-aware capabilities rivaling or even surpassing their teacher GNNs. In this paper, we theoretically answer how knowledge distillation unlocks MLPs’ potential for graph tasks from the perspective of training dynamics, demonstrating that label alignment in KD fundamentally reshapes the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix of student MLPs to enable them to learn the teacher model's implicit graph bias. We further investigate finer-grained distillation paradigms, and reveal that conventional layer-wise output alignment fails to effectively align deep-layer graph propagation outcomes. To address this, we propose Dual-Stream Aligned MLP (DA-MLP), which incorporates complementary graph filters in a dual-stream architecture to simultaneously enhance feature space dimensionality for improved represenation alignment while preserving graph signals across different frequency bands. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate that DA-MLP can be seamlessly integrated into existing knowledge distillation frameworks and consistently demonstrates performance enhancements in both transductive and inductive settings.

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.

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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.

We present Flow-Induced Diagonal Gaussian Processes (FiD-GP), a compression framework that incorporates a compact inducing weight matrix to project a neural network’s weight uncertainty into a lower-dimensional subspace. Critically, FiD-GP relies on normalising flow variational posterior and spectral regularisations to augment its expressiveness and align the inducing subspace with feature-gradient geometry through a numerically stable projection mechanism objective. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the prediction framework in FiD-GP can help to design a single pass projection for Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection. Our analysis shows that FiD-GP improves uncertainty estimation ability on various tasks compared with SVGP-based baselines, satisfies tight spectral residual bounds with theoretically guaranteed OoD detection, and significantly compresses the neural network’s storage requirements at the cost of increased inference computation dependent on the number of inducing weights employed. Specifically, in a comprehensive empirical study spanning regression, image classification, semantic segmentation, and Out-of-Distribution detection benchmarks, it significantly cuts Bayesian training cost, compresses parameters by roughly 51%, reduces model size by about 75%, and matches state-of-the-art accuracy and uncertainty estimation.

Flow-Induced Diagonal Gaussian Processes

Medical language models face critical barriers to real-world clinical reasoning applications. 
However, mainstream efforts, which fall short in task coverage, lack fine-grained supervision for intermediate reasoning steps, and rely on proprietary systems, are still far from a versatile, credible and efficient language model for clinical reasoning usage.
To this end, we propose MedS$^3$, a self-evolving framework that imparts robust reasoning capabilities to small, deployable models. 
Starting with 8,000 curated instances sampled via a curriculum strategy across five medical domains and 16 datasets, we use a small base policy model to conduct Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for constructing rule-verifiable reasoning trajectories. 
Self-explored reasoning trajectories ranked by node values are used to bootstrap the policy model via reinforcement fine-tuning and preference learning. 
Moreover, we introduce a soft dual process reward model that incorporates value dynamics: steps that degrade node value are penalized, enabling fine-grained identification of reasoning errors even when the final answer is correct.
Experiments on eleven benchmarks show that MedS$^3$ outperforms the previous state-of-the-art medical model by +6.45 accuracy points and surpasses 32B-scale general-purpose reasoning models by +8.57 points.
Additional empirical analysis further demonstrates that MedS$^3$ achieves robust and faithful reasoning behavior.

MedS³: Towards Medical Slow Thinking with Self-Evolved Soft Dual-sided Process Supervision

In semi‑supervised multi‑view classification (SMVC), scarce labels and noisy unlabeled data impair feature aggregation and compromise prediction reliability, while existing methods lack principled guidance and interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unified SMVC framework, Neural Collapse Priors Driven Trust Semi-Supervised Multi-View Classification (NCPD-TSMVC), builting upon neural collapse–derived prototype priors and evidential opinion fusion. Concretely, we rigorously prove under neural collapse theory that normalized classifier weights from the labeled‑data pre‑training stage coincide with class centroids in feature space, conferring maximal inter‑class separation and optimal within‑class compactness. These prototype priors permeate the entire learning pipeline, calibrating the representation learning of unlabeled samples to obtain highly discriminative embeddings. Simultaneously, our evidential learning module quantifies epistemic uncertainty and fuses view‑level opinions at the evidence level, yielding robust and transparent decision making. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that NCPD‑TSMVC surpasses state‑of‑the‑art SMVC approaches in performance, robustness and interpretability.

Neural Collapse Priors Driven Trust Semi-Supervised Multi-View Classification

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) aims to identify specific actions in long, untrimmed videos by determining their start, end times and categories, yet existing models suffer from performance degradation under out-of-distribution scenarios due to unrealistic i.i.d. assumptions. While domain generalization (DG) offers a promising solution, image-based DG methods fail to address the unique spatiotemporal challenges in video-based TAD, including the spatiotemporal complexities and significant variations in action instance scales and densities across domains. To bridge this gap, we propose the first DG framework tailored for TAD. We propose Scene-Aware Video Segmentation, which segments videos based on semantic similarity, addressing cross-domain action instance density and scale discrepancies. Additionally, we present Temporal-Aware Normalization Perturbation to generate diverse video features while preserving temporal integrity. We establish the first DG-TAD benchmark, evaluating 11 state-of-the-art DG methods across four datasets. The experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior generalization on unseen domains. The proposed modules are architecture-agnostic, offering plug-and-play compatibility for broader video understanding tasks.

Scene-Aware Spatiotemporal Generalization: Towards Robust Temporal Action Detection Across Domains

Graphs effectively model interactions in real-world applications such as social and trade networks, where Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at tasks such as link prediction to enhance user experiences. Despite these benefits, users raise privacy concerns as user data can be exploited to improve GNN performance without consent. Accordingly, various graph unlearning methods have been developed. Prior work shows that comparing models before and after unlearning enables attackers to launch former membership inference attacks (FMIA) on unlearned data. However, the imprint of unlearned data left in the unlearned model itself remains underexplored, and existing membership inference methods mainly exploit overfitting, making them ineffective for identifying unlearned data. To address this, we conducted theoretical analysis and proposed an attack framework targeting unlearned GNNs by learning the distribution patterns of unlearned data to distinguish them from normal test data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and GNN architectures confirm our framework's effectiveness and reveal significant vulnerabilities in current graph unlearning methods.

Imprint of the Forgotten: Stealthy Membership Inference in Unlearned Graph Neural Networks

Federated Recommendation (FR) is a distributed framework for training recommendation models, which enhances privacy by sharing model parameters instead of raw data. However, the large number of parameters, primarily due to the massive item embeddings, significantly hampers communication efficiency. While existing studies mainly focus on improving the efficiency of FR models, they largely overlook the issue of embedding parameter overhead. To address this gap, we propose a FR training framework with Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) based embedding designed to reduce the volume of embedding parameters that need to be transmitted. Our approach offers a lightweight, plugin-style solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing FR methods. In addition to incorporating common PEFT techniques such as LoRA and Hash-based encoding, we explore the use of Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoders (RQ-VAE) as a novel PEFT strategy within our framework. Extensive experiments across various FR model backbones and datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces communication overhead while improving accuracy.

Plug-and-Play Parameter-Efficient Tuning of Embeddings for Federated Recommendation

Customized text-to-video generation (CTVG) has recently witnessed significant progress in generating tailored videos from user-specific text. However, existing CTVG methods unrealistically assume that personalized concepts remain static and do not expand incrementally over time. Additionally, they struggle with catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect when continuously learning new concepts, including subjects and motions. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continual Customized Video Diffusion (CCVD) model, which can continuously learn new concepts to generate videos across various text-to-video generation tasks by tackling catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect. Specifically, to address catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a concept-specific attribute retention module and a task-aware concept aggregation strategy. They can capture the unique characteristics and identities of old concepts during training, while combining all subject and motion adapters of old concepts based on their relevance during testing. Furthermore, to tackle concept neglect, we develop a controllable conditional synthesis to enhance regional features and align video contexts with user conditions, by incorporating layer-specific region attention and attention-guided noise estimation. Experimental comparisons demonstrate that our CCVD model outperforms existing CTVG models.

Bring Your Dreams to Life: Continual Text-to-Video Customization

Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (ReasonVOS) is a challenging task that requires stable object segmentation across video sequences using implicit and complex textual inputs. Previous methods fine-tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce segmentation outputs, which demand substantial resources. Additionally, some existing methods are coupled in the processing of spatio-temporal information, which affects the temporal stability of the model to some extent. To address these issues, we propose Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory (SDAM). We aim to design a training-free reasoning video segmentation framework that outperforms existing methods requiring fine-tuning, using only pre-trained models. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Object Memory module that selects and memorizes key objects based on motion cues in different video sequences. Finally, we propose Spatio-temporal Decoupling for stable temporal propagation. In the spatial domain, we achieve precise localization and segmentation of target objects, while in the temporal domain, we leverage key object temporal information to drive stable cross-frame propagation. Our method achieves excellent results on five benchmark datasets, including Ref-YouTubeVOS, Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, ReasonVOS, and ReVOS. We will release the code.

Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory

Irregular multivariate time series (IMTS), characterized by uneven sampling and inter‑variate asynchrony, fuel many forecasting applications yet remain challenging to model efficiently. Canonical Pre‑Alignment (CPA) has been widely adopted in IMTS modeling by padding zeros at every global timestamp, thereby alleviating inter-variate asynchrony and unifying the series length, but its dense zero‑padding inflates the pre‑aligned series length, especially when numerous variates are present, causing prohibitive compute overhead. Recent graph‑based models with patching strategies sidestep CPA, but their local message passing struggles to capture global inter‑variate correlations. Therefore, we posit that CPA should be retained, with the pre‑aligned series properly handled by the model, enabling it to outperform state‑of‑the‑art graph‑based baselines that sidestep CPA. Technically, we propose KAFNet, a compact architecture grounded in CPA for IMTS forecasting that couples (1) Pre‑Convolution module for sequence smoothing and sparsity mitigation, (2) Temporal Kernel Aggregation module for learnable compression and modeling of intra-series irregularity, and (3) Frequency Linear Attention blocks for the low‑cost inter-series correlations modeling in the frequency domain. Experiments on multiple IMTS datasets show that KAFNet achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance, with a 7.2× parameter reduction and a 8.4× training-inference acceleration. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/zhouziyu02/KAFNet.

Revitalizing Canonical Pre-Alignment for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Recent advances in multi-agent Large Language Model-based code generation enable collaborative software development through role-specialized agents. However, failure localization of code generation remains challenging due to inter-agent dependencies and solution-path multiplicity. Consequently, existing prompting-based localization methods exhibit vulnerability towards semantically valid but non-canonical strategies. To address this, we propose FLKR (Failure Localization via Knowledge-guided Reasoning), an self-supervised framework that combines behavior encoding, knowledge-strategy alignment, and consistency scoring for solution-path invariant localization. To evaluate, we also introduce COFL (Code Oriented Failure Localization), the first expert-annotated benchmark for fine-grained failure localization. Experiments show FLKR outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based baselines by up to 14 points in Fault Localization Accuracy and 45 points in Top-1 accuracy, with strong performance in divergent, real-world, and refinement-critical cases. Such results demonstrate that our proposed FLKR generalizes well to real-world software development scenarios and opens up a new direction for failure-aware refinement recommendation by providing precise and interpretable responsibility signals.

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Flow-Induced Diagonal Gaussian Processes

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Next from AAAI 2026

Flow-Induced Diagonal Gaussian Processes

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Extracting Low-/High- Frequency Knowledge from Graph Neural Networks and Injecting it into MLPs: An Effective GNN-to-MLP Distillation Framework

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