Singapore

Automated Heuristic Design (AHD) using Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved notable success in recent years. Despite the effectiveness of existing approaches, they only design a single heuristic to serve all problem instances, often inducing poor generalization across different distributions or settings. To address this issue, we propose Automated Heuristic Set Design (AHSD), a new formulation for LLM-driven AHD. The aim of AHSD is to automatically generate a small-sized complementary heuristic set to serve diverse problem instances, such that each problem instance could be optimized by at least one heuristic in this set. We show that the objective function of AHSD is monotone and supermodular. Then, we propose Evolution of Heuristic Set (EoH-S) to apply the AHSD formulation for LLM-driven AHD. With two novel mechanisms of complementary population management and complementary-aware memetic search, EoH-S could effectively generate a set of high-quality and complementary heuristics. Comprehensive experimental results on three AHD tasks with diverse instances spanning various sizes and distributions demonstrate that EoH-S consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art AHD methods and achieves up to 60% performance improvements.

AAAI 2026

EoH-S: Evolution of Heuristic Set Using LLMs for Automated Heuristic Design

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.

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.

Time series analysis is crucial in various fields such as healthcare and finance. However, environmental variations and the inherent non-stationarity of time series data often lead to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, consequently causing model performance degradation. Most existing OOD generalization methods primarily focus on images or text, leaving time series analysis relatively underexplored. In this paper, we propose COGS, a novel framework that incorporates causal representation learning into the OOD generalization of time series. By imposing structural priors, our method identifies latent variables and learns a causal graph to disentangle causal variables from non-causal ones. These causal variables are then used to learn domain-invariant representations for stable prediction. Moreover, to tackle the challenge of the absence of domain labels, we further introduce a prototype-based domain discovery algorithm that infers domain labels in an unsupervised manner. The entire framework is optimized in a two-phase iterative manner, resulting in robust OOD performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to baseline methods.

COGS: A Causal Representation Learning Framework for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation serves as a key task in the development of endoscopic navigation systems.However, performance degradation persists due to uneven illumination inherent in endoscopy images, particularly in low-intensity regions.Existing low-light enhancement techniques fail to effectively guide the depth network. Furthermore, solutions from other fields, like autonomous driving, require well-lit images, making them unsuitable and increasing data collection burdens.To this end, we present DeLightMono - a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation framework with illumination decoupling.Specifically, endoscopic images are represented by a designed illumination-reflectance-depth model, and are decomposed with auxiliary networks.Moreover, a self-supervised joint-optimizing framework with novel losses leveraging the decoupled components is proposed to mitigate the effects of uneven illumination on depth estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was rigorously verified through extensive comparisons and an ablation study performed on two public datasets.

DeLightMono: Enhancing Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Endoscopy by Decoupling Uneven Illumination

Finding near-optimal solutions for dense multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems in real-time remains challenging even for state-of-the-art planners. To this end, we develop a hybrid framework that integrates a learned heuristic derived from MAGAT, a neural MAPF policy with a graph attention scheme, into a leading search-based algorithm, LaCAM. While prior work has explored learning-guided search in MAPF, such methods have historically underperformed. In contrast, our approach, termed LaGAT, outperforms both purely search-based and purely learning-based methods in dense scenarios. This is achieved through an enhanced MAGAT architecture, a pre-train–then–fine-tune strategy on maps of interest, and a deadlock detection scheme to account for imperfect neural guidance. Our results demonstrate that, when carefully designed, hybrid search offers a powerful solution for tightly coupled, challenging multi-agent coordination problems.

Graph Attention-Guided Search for Dense Multi-Agent Pathfinding

We tackle the task of customized image editing using a text-conditioned Diffusion Model (DM). The goal is to fuse the subject in a reference image (e.g., sunglasses) with a source one (e.g., a boy), while retaining the fidelity of them both (e.g., the boy wearing the sunglasses). An intuitive approach, called LoRA fusion, first separately trains a DM LoRA for each image to encode its details. Then the two LoRAs are linearly combined by a weight to generate a fused image. Unfortunately, even through careful grid search or learning the weight, this approach still trades off the fidelity of one image against the other. We point out that the evil lies in the overlooked role of diffusion time-step in the generation process, i.e., a smaller time-step controls the generation of a more fine-grained attribute. For example, a large LoRA weight for the source may help preserve its fine-grained details (e.g., face attributes) at a small time-step, but could overpower the reference subject LoRA and lose the fidelity of its overall shape at a larger time-step. To address this deficiency, we propose TimeFusion, which learns a time-step-specific LoRA fusion weight that resolves the trade-off, i.e., generating the source and reference subject in high fidelity given their respective prompt. Then we can customize image editing using this weight and a target prompt.

Object Fusion via Diffusion Time-step for Customized Image Editing with Single Example

Explainable AI (XAI) methods generally fall into two categories. Post-hoc approaches generate explanations for pre-trained models and are compatible with various neural network architectures. These methods often use feature importance visualizations, such as saliency maps, to indicate which input regions influenced the model’s prediction. Unfortunately, they typically offer a coarse understanding of the model’s decision-making process. In contrast, ante-hoc (inherently explainable) methods rely on specially designed model architectures trained from scratch. A notable subclass of these methods provides explanations through prototypes, representative patches extracted from the training data. However, prototype-based approaches have limitations: they require dedicated architectures, involve specialized training procedures, and perform well only on specific datasets. In this work, we propose EPIC (Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification), a novel approach that bridges the gap between these two paradigms. Like post-hoc methods, EPIC operates on pre-trained models without architectural modifications. Simultaneously, it delivers intuitive, prototype-based explanations inspired by ante-hoc techniques. To the best of our knowledge, EPIC is the first post-hoc method capable of fully replicating the core explanatory power of inherently interpretable models. We evaluate EPIC on benchmark datasets commonly used in prototype-based explanations, such as CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars, alongside large-scale datasets like ImageNet, typically employed by post-hoc methods. EPIC uses prototypes to explain model decisions, providing a flexible and easy-to-understand tool for creating clear, high-quality explanations.

EPIC: Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification Networks via Prototypes

Generalised planning (GP) refers to the task of synthesising programs that can solve families of related problems.
In this paper, we describe a novel, yet simple method for GP: given a set of training problems, compute a plan for each single goal atom optimally in some order for each problem, perform goal regression on the resulting plans, and lift the corresponding partial-state, action pairs to obtain a set of first-order rules. 
The lifted rules can be executed as is, or encoded as planning axioms for state space pruning during search.
We formalise and prove the conditions under which this method is guaranteed to learn sound and complete generalised plans, and when state space pruning returns optimal plans when used in search.
Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art (generalised) planners with respect to the 3 metrics of synthesis cost, planning coverage, and solution quality on various classical and numeric planning domains.

Satisficing and Optimal Generalised Planning via Goal Regression

Optimizing the similarity between parametric shapes is crucial for numerous computer vision tasks, where Intersection over Union (IoU) stands as the canonical measure. However, existing optimization methods exhibit significant shortcomings: regression‐based losses like L1/L2 lack correlation with IoU, IoU‐based losses are unstable and limited to simple shapes, and task‐specific methods are computationally intensive and not generalizable across domains. As a result, the current landscape of parametric shape objective functions has become scattered, with each domain proposing distinct IoU approximations. To address this, we unify the parametric shape optimization objective functions by introducing Marginalized Generalized IoU (MGIoU), a novel loss function that overcomes these challenges by projecting structured convex shapes onto their unique shape Normals to compute one‐dimensional normalized GIoU. MGIoU offers a simple, efficient, fully differentiable approximation strongly correlated with IoU. We then extend MGIoU to MGIoU$^{+}$, which supports optimizing unstructured convex shapes. Together, MGIoU and MGIoU$^{+}$ unify parametric shape optimization across diverse applications. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MGIoU and MGIoU$^{+}$ deliver higher performance while reducing loss computation latency up to 10--40$\times$. Additionally, MGIoU and MGIoU$^{+}$ satisfy metric properties and scale‐invariance, ensuring robustness as an objective function. We further propose MGIoU$^{-}$ for minimizing overlaps in tasks like collision‐free trajectory prediction. Code is available at [hidden].

Marginalized Generalized IoU (MGIoU): A Unified Objective Function for Optimizing Convex Parametric Shapes

Recent studies have demonstrated that hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks. However, existing methods rely on the specific information mechanisms of target HGNNs, overlooking the common vulnerability caused by the significant differences in hyperedge pivotality along aggregation paths in most HGNNs, thereby limiting the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. In this paper, we present a novel framework, i.e., Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges (TH-Attack), to address these limitations. Specifically, we design a hyperedge recognizer via pivotality assessment to obtain pivotal hyperedges within the aggregation paths of HGNNs. Furthermore, we introduce a feature inverter based on pivotal hyperedges, which generates malicious nodes by maximizing the semantic divergence between the generated features and the pivotal hyperedges features. Lastly, by injecting these malicious nodes into the pivotal hyperedges, TH-Attack improves the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. Extensive experiments are conducted on six authentic datasets to validate the effectiveness of TH-Attack and the corresponding superiority to state-of-the-art methods. Codes will be made public upon paper acceptance.

Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges

Black-box tuning is an emerging paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to better achieve desired behaviors, particularly when direct access to model parameters is unavailable. Current strategies, however, often present a dilemma of suboptimal extremes: either separately train a small proxy model and then use it to shift the predictions of the foundation model, offering notable efficiency but often yielding limited improvement; or making API calls in each tuning iteration to the foundation model, which entails prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we argue that a more reasonable way for black-box tuning is to train the proxy model with limited API calls. The underlying intuition is based on two key observations: first, the training samples may exhibit correlations and redundancies, suggesting that the foundation model’s predictions can be estimated from previous calls; second, foundation models frequently demonstrate low accuracy on downstream tasks. Therefore, we propose a novel advanced black-box tuning method for LLMs with limited API calls. Our core strategy involves training a Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate model with "LogitMap Pairs" derived from querying the foundation model on a minimal but highly informative training subset. This surrogate can approximate the outputs of the foundation model to guide the training of the proxy model, thereby effectively reducing the need for direct queries to the foundation model. Extensive experiments verify that our approach elevates pre-trained language model accuracy from 55.92% to 86.85%, reducing the frequency of API queries to merely 1.38%. This significantly outperforms offline approaches that operate entirely without API access. Notably, our method also achieves comparable or superior accuracy to query-intensive approaches, while significantly reducing API costs. This offers a robust and high-efficiency paradigm for language model adaptation.

Advanced Black-Box Tuning of Large Language Models with Limited API Calls

In daily fantasy sports (DFS), match participation is highly time-sensitive. 
Users must act within a narrow window before a game begins, making match recommendation a time-critical task to prevent missed engagement and revenue loss. Existing recommender systems, typically designed for static item catalogs, are ill-equipped to handle the hard temporal deadlines inherent in these live events. To address this, we designed and deployed a recommendation engine using the Deep Interest Network (DIN) architecture. 
We adapt the DIN architecture by injecting temporality at two levels: first, through real-time urgency features for each candidate match (e.g., time-to-round-lock), and second, via temporal positional encodings that represent the time-gap between each historical interaction and the current recommendation request, allowing the model to dynamically weigh the recency of past actions. 
This approach, combined with a listwise neuralNDCG loss function, produces highly relevant and urgency-aware rankings. To support this at industrial scale, we developed a multi-node, multi-GPU training architecture on Ray and PyTorch. Our system, validated on a massive industrial dataset with over 650k users and over 100B interactions, achieves a +9\% lift in nDCG@1 over a heavily optimized LightGBM baseline with handcrafted features. The strong offline performance of this model establishes its viability as a core component for our planned on-device (edge) recommendation system, where online A/B testing will be conducted.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

COGS: A Causal Representation Learning Framework for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series

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

COGS: A Causal Representation Learning Framework for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads