Singapore

Current graph neural network (GNN) model-stealing methods rely heavily on queries to the victim model, assuming no hard query limits. However, in reality, the number of allowed queries can be severely limited. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can extract the GNN with very limited interactions with the model. Our approach first enables the adversary to obtain the model backbone without making direct queries to the victim model and then to strategically utilize a fixed query limit to extract the most informative data.

AAAI 2026

On Stealing Graph Neural Network Models

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.

Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-resolution wealth maps that can be leveraged across multiple causal trials while addressing chronic data scarcity in global development research. However, because standard training objectives prioritize overall predictive accuracy, these predictions inherently suffer from shrinkage toward the mean, leading to attenuated estimates of causal treatment effects and limiting their utility in policy evaluations. Existing debiasing methods, such as Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI), can handle this attenuation bias but require additional fresh ground-truth data at the downstream stage of causal inference, which restricts their applicability in data-scarce environments. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate two correction methods—linear calibration correction and Tweedie's correction—that substantially reduce prediction bias without relying on newly collected labeled data. Linear calibration (LCC) corrects bias through a straightforward linear transformation derived from held-out calibration data, whereas Tweedie's correction leverages empirical Bayes principles to directly address shrinkage-induced biases by exploiting score functions derived from evaluating the model's learning patterns. Through analytical exercises and experiments using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, we demonstrate that both proposed methods meet or outperform existing approaches that either require (a) adjustments to training pipelines or (b) additional labeled data, achieving significant reductions in attenuation bias in data-scarce environments. These approaches may represent a promising avenue for improving the reliability of causal inference when direct outcome measures are limited or unavailable, enabling a ``one map, many trials'' paradigm where a single upstream data creation team produces predictions usable by many downstream teams across diverse ML pipelines.

Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: “One Map, Many Trials” in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis

Recent learning-based methods have reduced the computational complexity of traditional trajectory similarity computation, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still fail to leverage the comprehensive spectrum of trajectory information for similarity modeling. To tackle this problem, we propose \textbf{RePo}, a novel method that jointly encodes \textbf{Re}gion-wise and \textbf{Po}int-wise features to capture both spatial context and fine-grained moving patterns. For region-wise representation, the GPS trajectories are first mapped to grid sequences, and spatial context are captured by structural features and semantic context enriched by visual features. For point-wise representation, three lightweight expert networks extract local, correlation, and continuous movement patterns from dense GPS sequences. Then, a router network adaptively fuses the learned point-wise features, which are subsequently combined with region-wise features using cross-attention to produce the final trajectory embedding. To train RePo, we adopt a contrastive loss with hard negative samples to provide similarity ranking supervision. Experiment results show that RePo achieves an average accuracy improvement of 22.2\% over SOTA baselines across all evaluation metrics.

Region-Point Joint Representation for Effective Trajectory Similarity Learning

Multimodal Large Language Models struggle to maintain reliable performance under extreme real-world visual degradations, which impede their practical robustness. Current robustness enhancement methods rely on implicit training/adaptation that focuses solely on visual encoder generalization, suffering from limited interpretability and isolated optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust-R1, a novel framework that explicitly models visual degradations through structured reasoning chains. Our approach integrates: (i) supervised fine-tuning for degradation-aware reasoning foundations, (ii) reward-driven alignment for accurately perceiving degradation parameters, and (iii) dynamic reasoning depth scaling adapted to degradation intensity. To support this methodology, we introduce a novel 11K dataset featuring realistic degradations synthesized across four critical real-world visual processing stages, each annotated with structured chains connecting degradation parameters, perceptual effects, and pristine semantic reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness: Robust-R1 outperforms all general and robust baselines on the real-world degradation benchmark R-Bench, while maintaining superior anti-degradation performance under multi-intensity adversarial degradations on MMBench, MMStar, and RealWorldQA.
We will release our code, demo, and dataset soon.

Robust-R1: Degradation-Aware Reasoning for Robust Visual Understanding

Responsibility is a central concept in accountable decision making for multiagent systems. As modern AI systems grow in complexity and autonomy, there is a growing demand for them to address issues in AI ethics, prompting researchers to formalize responsibility from diverse perspectives, including strategic responsibility. However, causal responsibility, i.e. responsibility due to actual causal contribution, has received much less attention. In this paper, we study variants of responsibility attribution from both strategic and causal perspectives within a synchronous game-theoretic logic framework that allows concurrent moves by multiple agents. Our formalization is based on Situation Calculus Synchronous Game Structures (SCSGS). We show that by combining these perspectives, one can obtain novel forms of responsibility attribution that are grounded on actual causation. While doing this, we propose an account of actual causation in SCSGSs. We prove that our formalization handles the issues associated with preemption and over-determination well. We also study some key properties of responsibility and demonstrate that causal, strategic, and combined notions of responsibility are extensionally distinct.

Causal, Strategic, and Combined Responsibility Attribution in Situation Calculus Concurrent Game Structures

Recent advances in video understanding have been driven by MLLMs.
But these MLLMs are good at analyzing short videos,
while suffering from difficulties in understanding videos with a longer context.
To address this difficulty,
several agent paradigms have recently been proposed, 
using MLLMs as agents for retrieving extra contextual knowledge in a long video.
However,
most existing agents ignore the key fact that a long video is composed with multiple shots,
i.e.,
to answer the user question from a long video, 
it is critical to deeply understand its relevant shots like human.
Without such insight,
these agents often mistakenly find redundant even noisy temporal context,
restricting their capacity for long video understanding.
To fill this gap,
we propose VideoChat-A1, 
a novel long video agent paradigm.
Different from the previous works,
our VideoChat-A1 can deeply think with long videos,
via a distinct chain-of-shot reasoning paradigm.
More specifically,
it can progressively select the relevant shots of user question,
and 
look into these shots in a coarse-to-fine partition.
By multi-modal reasoning along the shot chain,
VideoChat-A1 can effectively mimic step-by-step human thinking process,
allowing the interactive discovery of preferable temporal context for thoughtful understanding in long videos.
Extensive experiments show that,
VideoChat-A1 achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the mainstream long video QA benchmarks,
e.g., it achieves 77.0 on VideoMME~(w/ subs) and 70.1 on EgoSchema, 
outperforming its strong baselines (e.g., InternVL2.5-8B and InternVideo2.5-8B),
by up to 10.1\% and 6.2\%. Compared to leading closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, VideoChat-A1 offers competitive accuracy, 
but only with 7\% input frames and 12\% inference time on average.

VideoChat-A1: Thinking with Long Videos by Chain-of-Shot Reasoning

Recently, large-scale language-image pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP) have achieved remarkable success in various retrieval tasks. However, transferring the knowledge learned from such models to Video-based Visible-Infrared person Re-IDentification (VVI-ReID) remains unexplored. The primary challenges are narrowing the modality gap and leveraging spatiotemporal information in video sequences. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-modality feature learning framework named X-ReID for VVI-ReID. Specifically, we first propose a Cross-modality Prototype Collaboration (CPC) to align and integrate features from different modalities, guiding the network to reduce the modality discrepancy. Then, a Multi-granularity Information Interaction (MII) is designed, incorporating short-term interactions from adjacent frames, long-term cross-frame information fusion, and cross-modality feature alignment to enhance temporal modeling and further reduce modality gaps. Finally, by integrating multi-granularity information, a robust sequence-level representation is achieved. Extensive experiments on two large-scale VVI-ReID benchmarks (i.e., HITSZ-VCM and BUPTCampus) demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

X-ReID: Multi-granularity Information Interaction for Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) extend large language models with explicit, multi-step reasoning traces to enhance transparency and performance on complex tasks.
However, these reasoning traces can be redundant or logically inconsistent, becoming a new and hard-to-detect source of hallucination.
Existing hallucination detection methods focus primarily on answer-level uncertainty and often fail to detect hallucinations or logical inconsistencies arising from the model’s reasoning trace.
This oversight is particularly problematic for LRMs, where the explicit thinking trace is not only an important support to the model's decision-making process but also a key source of potential hallucination. 
To this end, we propose RACE (Reasoning and Answer Consistency Evaluation), a novel framework specifically tailored for hallucination detection in LRMs.
RACE operates by extracting essential reasoning steps and computing four diagnostic signals: inter-sample consistency of reasoning traces, entropy-based answer uncertainty, semantic alignment between reasoning and answers, and internal coherence of reasoning. This joint analysis enables fine-grained hallucination detection even when the final answer appears correct.
Experiments across datasets and different LLMs demonstrate that RACE outperforms existing hallucination detection baselines, offering a robust and generalizable solution for evaluating LRMs.

Joint Evaluation of Answer and Reasoning Consistency for Hallucination Detection in Large Reasoning Models

Imputing missing values in spatial-temporal traffic data is essential for intelligent transportation systems. Among advanced imputation methods, score-based diffusion models have demonstrated competitive performance. These models generate data by reversing a noising process, using observed values as conditional guidance. However, existing diffusion models typically apply a uniform guidance scale across both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is inadequate for nodes with high missing data rates. Sparse observations provide insufficient conditional guidance, causing the generative process to drift toward the learned prior distribution rather than closely following the conditional observations, resulting in suboptimal imputation performance.

To address this, we propose FENCE (Spatial-Temporal Feedback Diffusion Guidance), a novel method that adaptively controls guidance scales during imputation. First, FENCE introduces a dynamic feedback mechanism that adjusts the guidance scale based on the posterior likelihood approximations. The guidance scale is increased when generated values diverge from observations and reduced when alignment improves, preventing overcorrection. Second, because alignment to observations varies across nodes and denoising steps, a global guidance scale for all nodes is suboptimal. FENCE computes guidance scales at the cluster level by grouping nodes based on their attention scores, leveraging spatial-temporal correlations to provide more accurate guidance. Experimental results on real-world traffic datasets show that FENCE significantly enhances imputation accuracy.

Spatial-Temporal Feedback Diffusion Guidance for Controlled Traffic Imputation

While large vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive long-context understanding, their prevalent small branches fails on linguistics-photography alignment for limited window size. We discover that knowledge distillation improve students capability as compelementary to Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) on certain windows size (anchored from large models). Building on this insight, we propose LAid, which explicitly targets the transfer of long-range attention mechanisms through two complementary components: (1) a progressive distance-weighted attention matching that dynamically emphasizes longer position differences during training, and (2) a learnable RoPE response gain modulation that selectively amplifies position sensitivity where needed. Extensive experiments across multiple model families demonstrate that LAid-distilled models achieve up to 3.2× longer effective context windows compared to baseline small models, while maintaining or improving performance on standard VL benchmarks. Spectral analysis also suggests that LAid successfully preserves crucial low-frequency attention components that conventional methods fail to transfer. Our work not only provides practical techniques for building more efficient long-context VLMs but also offers theoretical insights into how positional understanding emerges and transfers during distillation.

Towards Long-window Anchoring in Vision-Language Model Distillation

Multimodal Large Language Models are primarily trained and evaluated on aligned image-text pairs, which leaves their ability to detect and resolve real-world inconsistencies largely unexplored. In open-domain applications visual and textual cues often conflict, requiring models to perform structured reasoning beyond surface-level alignment.
We introduce CrossCheck-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating contradiction detection in multimodal inputs. The benchmark adopts a hierarchical task framework covering three levels of reasoning complexity and defines seven atomic capabilities essential for resolving cross-modal inconsistencies. CrossCheck-Bench includes 15k question-answer pairs sourced from real-world artifacts with synthetically injected contradictions. The dataset is constructed through a multi-stage annotation pipeline involving more than 450 expert hours to ensure semantic validity and calibrated difficulty across perception, integration, and reasoning.
We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art vision-language models and observe a consistent performance drop as tasks shift from perceptual matching to logical contradiction detection. Most models perform well on isolated entity recognition but fail when multiple clues must be synthesized for conflict reasoning. Capability-level analysis further reveals uneven skill acquisition, especially in tasks requiring multi-step inference or rule-based validation.
Additional probing shows that conventional prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Set-of-Mark yield only marginal gains. By contrast, methods that interleave symbolic reasoning with grounded visual processing achieve more stable improvements. These results highlight a persistent bottleneck in multimodal reasoning and suggest new directions for building models capable of robust cross-modal verification.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: “One Map, Many Trials” in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES