Singapore

Solving the problem of cooperation is fundamentally
important for the creation and maintenance of functional
societies. Problems of cooperation are omnipresent within
human society, with examples ranging from navigating busy
road junctions to negotiating treaties. As the use of AI
becomes more pervasive throughout society, the need for
socially intelligent agents capable of navigating these
complex cooperative dilemmas is becoming increasingly
evident. Direct punishment is a ubiquitous social mechanism
that has been shown to foster the emergence of cooperation
in both humans and non-humans. In the natural world, direct
punishment is often strongly coupled with partner selection
and reputation and used in conjunction with third-party
punishment. The interactions between these mechanisms could
potentially enhance the emergence of cooperation within
populations. However, no previous work has evaluated the
learning dynamics and outcomes emerging from multi-agent
reinforcement learning populations that combine these
mechanisms. This paper addresses this gap. It presents a
comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the behaviors and
learning dynamics associated with direct punishment,
third-party punishment, partner selection, and reputation.
Finally, we discuss the implications of using these
mechanisms on the design of cooperative AI systems.

AAAI 2026

Investigating the Impact of Direct Punishment on the
Emergence of Cooperation in Multi-agent Reinforcement
Learning Systems

mas: agent-based simulation and emergent behavior

mas: mechanism design

mas: coordination and collaboration

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.

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.

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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.

Failure-based variable ordering heuristics (VOH) are efficient general-purpose search heuristics for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). They learn from the failures detected during the search and select the variables that are most likely to fail. The current failure-based VOHs, i.e. FRBA and FLBA, focus on only the failures detected in left branches. In this paper, we investigate how the failure information from right branches affects the performance of the failure-based VOHs. Three strategies utilizing the failure information of right branches are proposed to refine the failure-based VOHs. Our experiments performed with the CSP instances used in recent MiniZinc challenge show that utilizing the failures detected in right branches enhances the performance of the failure-based VOHs. The refined version combining the three strategies gets the best performance. It demonstrates remarkable superiority over several general-purpose VOHs, including activity-based search, conflict-history search, refined weighted degree, pick/dom, and the existing FRBA, which are considered state-of-the-art. Our study demonstrates that right branch matters in failure-based VOHs for solving CSPs.

Right Branches Matter in Failure-based Variable Ordering Heuristics

Large language models have revolutionized agent planning by serving as the central reasoning engine. However, LLM-based agents often struggle to generalize across complex environments and to adapt to stochastic feedback arising from environment–action interactions. We propose Counterfactual Planning—a method designed to improve the generalizability and adaptability of agents' actions by inferring the causal representation of environmental confounders and performing counterfactual reasoning over planned actions. We formalize the agent planning process as a structural causal model, providing a mathematical formulation for causal analysis of how environmental states influence action generation and how actions affect future state transitions. To support generalizable action planning, we introduce the State Causality Evaluator (SCE), which dynamically infers task-conditioned causal representations from complex environment states; and to enhance adaptability under stochastic feedback, we propose the What-If-Not (WIN) reward, which performs counterfactual interventions to finish action refinement through causal evaluation. We validate our framework in an open-world environment, where experiments demonstrate improvements in both action generalization and planning adaptability.

Counterfactual Planning for Generalizable Agents’ Actions

Dataset distillation (DD) aims to generate a compact synthetic dataset that enables efficient training of neural networks while maintaining performance comparable to that achieved with the original dataset. However, existing methods often suffer from two main limitations. They either rely on computationally intensive iterative optimization procedures or depend heavily on architecture-specific designs. These issues limit their practicality for large-scale datasets and hinder generalization across different model architectures. 
To overcome these challenges, recent research has explored the use of diffusion models as an architecture-agnostic approach to dataset distillation, offering improved scalability and generalization for large-scale datasets across diverse model architectures.
While diffusion-based dataset distillation methods have shown considerable potential, several challenges remain. Notably, certain approaches exhibit a distributional mismatch between the pre-trained diffusion model and the target dataset, which can adversely affect the fidelity and representativeness of the generated samples.
Others require substantial fine-tuning to achieve high fidelity, which negates the benefits of architectural flexibility. In this work, we propose a new diffusion-based dataset distillation framework that effectively preserves the characteristics of the original dataset without requiring any fine-tuning. Our method employs adaptive sampling and repulsion regularization to enhance both the fidelity and diversity of generated samples. As a result, the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art distillation methods across a wide range of datasets and model architectures.

An Adaptive Sampling Framework for Diffusion-based Dataset Distillation with High Fidelity and Diversity

Cued Speech (CS) enhances lipreading via hand coding, offering visual phonemic cues that support precise speech perception for the hearing-impaired. The task of CS Video-to-Speech generation (CSV2S) aims to convert CS videos into intelligible speech signals. Most existing research focuses on CS Recognition (CSR), which transcribes video content into text. Consequently, a common solution for CSV2S is to integrate CSR with a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, this pipeline relies on text as an intermediate medium, which may lead to error propagation and temporal misalignment between speech and CS video dynamics. In contrast, directly generating audio speech from CS video (direct CSV2S) often suffer from the inherent multimodal complexity and the limited availability of CS data. To address these challenges, we propose UniCUE, the first unified framework for CSV2S that directly generates speech from CS videos without relying on intermediate text. The core innovation of UniCUE lies in integrating a understanding task (CSR) that provides fine-grained CS visual-semantic cues to to guide the speech generation. Specifically, UniCUE incorporates a pose-aware visual processor, a semantic alignment pool that enables precise visual–semantic mapping, and a VisioPhonetic adapter to bridge the understanding and generation tasks within a unified architecture. To support this framework, we construct UniCUE-HI, a large-scale Mandarin CS dataset containing 11,282 videos from 14 cuers, including both hearing-impaired and normal-hearing individuals. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that UniCUE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple evaluation metrics.

UniCUE: Unified Recognition and Generation Framework for Chinese Cued Speech Video-to-Speech Generation

We study a matrix completion problem where both the ground truth $R$ matrix and the unknown sampling distribution $P$ over observed entries are low-rank matrices, and *share a common subspace*. We assume that a large amount $M$ of unlabeled data drawn from the sampling distribution $P$ is available, together with a small amount $N$ of "labeled" data drawn from the same distribution and noisy estimates of the corresponding ground truth entries. This setting is inspired by recommender systems scenarios where the unlabeled data corresponds to "implicit feedback" (consisting in interactions such as purchase, click, etc. ) and the labeled data corresponds to the `explicit feedback', consisting of interactions where the user has given an explicit rating to the item. Leveraging powerful results from the theory of low-rank subspace recovery, together with classic generalization bounds for matrix completion models, we show error bounds consisting of a sum of two error terms scaling as $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{nd}{M}}\right)$ and $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{dr}{N}}\right)$ respectively, where $d$ is the rank of $P$ and $r$ is the rank of $M$. In synthetic experiments, we confirm that the true generalization error naturally splits into independent error terms corresponding to the estimations of $P$ and and the ground truth matrix $G$ respectively. In real-life experiments on Douban and MovieLens with most explicit ratings removed, we demonstrate that the method can outperform baselines relying only on the explicit ratings, demonstrating that our assumptions provide a valid toy theoretical setting to study the interaction between explicit and implicit feedbacks in recommender systems.

Generalization Bounds for Semi-supervised Matrix Completion with Distributional Side Information

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to incorporate structured knowledge via graph retrieval as contextual input, enhancing more accurate and context-aware reasoning. We observe that for different queries, it could retrieve similar subgraphs as prompts, and thus we propose SubGCache, which aims to reduce inference latency by reusing computation across queries with similar structural prompts (i.e., subgraphs). Specifically, SubGCache clusters queries based on subgraph embeddings, constructs a representative subgraph for each cluster, and pre-computes the key-value (KV) cache of the representative subgraph. For each query with its retrieved subgraph within a cluster, it reuses the pre-computed KV cache of the representative subgraph of the cluster without computing the KV tensors again for saving computation. Experiments on two datasets across multiple LLM backbones and graph-based RAG frameworks demonstrate that SubGCache consistently reduces inference latency with comparable and even improved generation quality, achieving up to 6.68x reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT). The codes and datasets are available at Supplementary Material.

SubGCache: Accelerating Graph-based RAG with Subgraph-level KV Cache

Generative modeling has transformed many fields like language and visual modeling, while its exploit in financial market is under-explored. As the minimal unit within a financial market is an order, order flow modeling represents the fundamental generative financial task. However, current approaches often result in unsatisfactory fidelity in generating order flow, and their generation lacks controllability, thereby limiting their application scenario. In this paper, we advocate incorporating controllability into the market generation process, and propose a Diffusion Guided meta Agent (DiGA) model to address the challenge. Specifically, we utilize a diffusion model to capture dynamics of market state represented by time-evolving distribution parameters about mid-price return rate and order arrival rate, and define a meta agent with financial economic priors to generate orders from the corresponding distributions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits outstanding controllability and fidelity in generation. Furthermore, we validate DiGA's effectiveness as generative environment for downstream financial applications.

Controllable Financial Market Generation with Diffusion Guided Meta Agent

The quality of experience (QoE) delivered by video conferencing systems is significantly influenced by accurately estimating the time-varying available bandwidth between the sender and receiver. Bandwidth estimation for real-time communications remains an open challenge due to rapidly evolving network architectures, increasingly complex protocol stacks, and the difficulty of defining QoE metrics that reliably improve user experience. In this work, we propose a deployed, human-in-the-loop, data-driven framework for bandwidth estimation to address these challenges. Our approach begins with training objective QoE reward models derived from subjective user evaluations to measure audio and video quality in real-time video conferencing systems. Subsequently, we collect roughly $1$M network traces with objective QoE rewards from real-world Microsoft Teams calls to curate a bandwidth estimation training dataset. We then introduce a novel distributional offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to train a neural-network-based bandwidth estimator aimed at improving QoE for users. Our real-world A/B test demonstrates that the proposed approach reduces the subjective poor call ratio by $11.41\%$ compared to the baseline bandwidth estimator. Furthermore, the proposed offline RL algorithm is benchmarked on D4RL tasks to demonstrate its generalization beyond bandwidth estimation.

Human-in-the-Loop Bandwidth Estimation for Quality of Experience Optimization in Real-Time Video Communication

Anytime multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is a promising approach to scalable and collision-free path optimization in multi-agent systems. MAPF-LNS, based on Large Neighborhood Search (LNS), is the current state-of-the-art approach where a fast initial solution is iteratively optimized by destroying and repairing selected paths, i.e., a neighborhood, of the solution. Delay-based MAPF-LNS has demonstrated particular effectiveness in generating promising neighborhoods via seed agents according to their delays. Seed agents are selected using handcrafted strategies or online learning, where the former relies on human intuition about underlying structures, while the latter conducts black box optimization, ignoring any structure. In this paper, we propose Truncated Adaptive Counterfactual K-ranked LEarning (TACKLE) to select seed agents using human intuition for informed online learning. We show theoretically that TACKLE dominates its handcrafted and black box learning counterparts in the limit. Our experiments demonstrate cost improvements by at least 60% in instances with up to a thousand agents, compared with state-of-the-art anytime MAPF solvers.

Truncated Counterfactual Learning for Anytime Multi-Agent Path Finding

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread, especially in sensitive applications where fairness is essential and biased outputs can cause significant harm. However, evaluating the fairness of models is a complex challenge, and approaches that do so typically utilize standard question-answer (QA) styled schemes. Such methods often overlook deeper issues by interpreting the model's refusal responses as positive fairness measurements, which creates a false sense of fairness. In this work, we introduce the concept of silenced biases, which are unfair preferences encoded within models' latent space and are effectively concealed by safety-alignment. Previous approaches that considered similar indirect biases often relied on prompt manipulation or handcrafted implicit queries, which present limited scalability and risk contaminating the evaluation process with additional biases. We propose the Silenced Bias Benchmark (SBB), which aims to uncover these biases by employing activation steering to reduce model refusals during QA. SBB supports easy expansion to new demographic groups and subjects, presenting a fairness evaluation framework that encourages the future development of fair models and tools beyond the masking effects of alignment training. We demonstrate our approach over multiple LLMs, where our findings expose an alarming distinction between models' direct responses and their underlying fairness issues.

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Right Branches Matter in Failure-based Variable Ordering Heuristics

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Emergence of Punishment in Social Dilemma with Environmental Feedback

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