Singapore

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in providing scalable mental health support, while evaluating their counseling capability remains crucial to ensure both efficacy and safety. Existing evaluations are limited by the static assessment that focuses on knowledge tests, the single perspective that centers on user experience, and the open-loop framework that lacks actionable feedback. To address these issues, we propose Ψ-Arena, an interactive framework for comprehensive assessment and optimization of LLM-based counselors, featuring three key characteristics: (1) Realistic arena interactions that simulate real-world counseling through multi-stage dialogues with psychologically profiled NPC clients; (2) Tripartite evaluation that integrates assessments from the client, supervisor, and counselor perspectives; (3) Closed-loop optimization that iteratively improves LLM counselors using diagnostic feedback. Experiments across eight state-of-the-art LLMs show significant performance variations in different real-world scenarios and evaluation perspectives. Moreover, reflection-based optimization results in up to a 141\% improvement in counseling performance. We hope Ψ-Arena provides a foundational resource for advancing reliable and human-aligned LLM applications in mental healthcare.

AAAI 2026

Ψ-Arena: Interactive Assessment and Optimization of LLM-based Psychological Counselors with Tripartite Feedback

cms: social cognition and interaction

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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.

This paper addresses the challenge of estimating local surface differential properties, specifically surface normals and curvatures, from raw 3D point clouds.
Traditional methods either rely on fitting pre-defined analytic surfaces risking model bias, or directly regress normals and curvatures overlooking their intrinsic geometric correlation.
We propose a learning-based approach that locally fits osculating implicit quadrics to recover both normals and curvatures simultaneously. Drawing on classical differential geometry, we exploit the fact that every point on a $C^2$ surface admits an osculating quadric in Monge form that exactly reproduces local differential properties. However, the Monge frame itself depends on the very differential quantities being estimated. 
To bypass this circularity, we reformulate the Monge-form quadric as an implicit representation in a canonical local frame derived solely from point coordinates, enabling supervised learning without requiring Monge frame alignment. 
This reformulation allows us to construct a ground-truth dataset of such local-frame quadrics and train a neural network to predict per-point weights and offsets for a robust weighted least squares fitting process. The learned offsets account for the deviations of neighboring points from the idealized osculating surface. We further incorporate stable curvature formulations into the training loss alongside normal supervision to enhance estimation fidelity. 
Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior approaches in normal and curvature estimation from raw point clouds.

OscuFit: Learning to Fit Osculating Implicit Quadrics for Point Clouds

Current paradigms for robotic imitation learning face a stark trade-off between the motion fidelity of diffusion models and the data scalability of inverse dynamics models. The latter, while scalable, often learns a latent action space disconnected from physical reality. This flaw leads to critical failures: temporal entanglement, where the model cannot distinguish between visually similar states requiring distinct actions, e.g., a gripper approaching versus receding from an object. This ambiguity, compounded by discretization artifacts and sensitivity to task-irrelevant dynamics, renders robust planning infeasible. We introduce LatentVLA, a vision-language-action framework designed to overcome these limitations by learning a continuous and spatiotemporally grounded latent action representation. Its progressive three-stage architecture first employs a Temporal-Attentive Latent Action Model (TA-LAM) to resolve ambiguities using language-guided attention and explicit temporal encoding. Subsequently, a Latent Action Diffusion Transformer (LADT) performs planning via diffusion directly within this continuous latent space, preserving motion fidelity without tokenization. Finally, an expert policy head translates these latent plans into precise robot actions. Experiments show LatentVLA sets a new state-of-the-art across a suite of real-world bimanual tasks, outperforming prior methods and demonstrating superior zero-shot generalization and few-shot efficiency.

LatentVLA: Taming Latent Space for Generalizable and Long-Horizon Bimanual Manipulation

We study an efficient implementation of
Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB)-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for classical planning.
One weakness of MCTS is that
it spends a significant time in deciding which node to expand next.
While selecting a node from an OPEN list with $N$ nodes has
$O(1)$ runtime complexity with traditional array-based priority-queues for dense integer keys,
the tree-based OPEN list used by MCTS requires $O(\log N)$,
which roughly corresponds to the search depth $d$.
In classical planning, $d$ is arbitrarily large (e.g., $2^k-1$ in $k$-disk Tower-of-Hanoi)
and the runtime for node selection is significant,
unlike in game tree search, where the cost is negligible compared to the node evaluation (rollouts)
because $d$ is inherently limited by the game (e.g. $d\leq 361$ in Go).
To improve this bottleneck,
we propose a bilevel modification to MCTS that
runs a best-first search from each selected leaf nodes with an expansion budget proportional to $d$,
which achieves amortized $O(1)$ runtime for node selection, equivalent to traditional queue-based OPEN list.
In addition, we introduce Tree Collapsing, an enhancement that reduces action selection steps
and further improves the performance.

Bilevel MCTS for Amortized O(1) Node Selection in Classical Planning

We introduce River, a novel Condorcet-consistent voting method that is based on pairwise majority margins and can be seen as a simplified variation of Tideman's Ranked Pairs method. River is simple to explain, simple to compute even "by hand," and gives rise to an easy-to-interpret certificate in the form of a directed tree. Like Ranked Pairs and Schulze's Beat Path method, River is a refinement of the Split Cycle method and shares with those many desirable properties, including independence of clones. Unlike the other three methods, River satisfies a strong form of resistance to agenda-manipulation that is known as independence of Pareto-dominated alternatives.

The River Voting Method

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to locate events that deviate from normal patterns in videos. Traditional approaches often rely on extensive labeled data and incur high computational costs. Recent tuning-free methods based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising alternative by leveraging their rich world knowledge. However, these methods typically rely on textual outputs, which introduces information loss, exhibits normalcy bias, and suffers from prompt sensitivity, making them insufficient for capturing subtle anomalous cues. To address these constraints, we propose HeadHunt-VAD, a novel tuning-free VAD paradigm that bypasses textual generation by directly hunting robust anomaly-sensitive internal attention heads within the frozen MLLM. Central to our method is a Robust Head Identification module that systematically evaluates all attention heads using a multi-criteria analysis of saliency and stability, identifying a sparse subset of heads that are consistently discriminative across diverse prompts. Features from these expert heads are then fed into a lightweight anomaly scorer and a temporal locator, enabling efficient and accurate anomaly detection with interpretable outputs. Extensive experiments show that HeadHunt-VAD achieves state-of-the-art performance among tuning-free methods on two major VAD benchmarks while maintaining high efficiency, validating head-level probing in MLLMs as a powerful and practical solution for real-world anomaly detection.

HeadHunt-VAD: Hunting Robust Anomaly-Sensitive Heads in MLLM for Tuning-Free Video Anomaly Detection

The growing industrial demand for customized and cost-efficient large language models (LLMs) is fueled by the rise of vertical, domain-specific tasks and the need to optimize performance under constraints such as latency and budget. Knowledge distillation, as an efficient model compression and transfer technique, offers a feasible solution. However, existing distillation frameworks often require manual intervention and struggle to meet such complex user-defined distillation requirements. To bridge this gap, we propose Stratos, an end-to-end LLM distillation pipeline that automates server/model selection, knowledge distillation, and deployment in distributed cloud environments. Given user-defined constraints on model performance and system budget, Stratos automatically selects Pareto-optimal servers, dynamically matches teacher–student pairs, and adapts distillation strategies based on task complexity to optimize cloud hosting. Experiments show that Stratos produces a student model that achieves four times the accuracy of its GPT-4o teacher baseline on a rare, domain-specific Mahjong reasoning task with reverse synthetic data and knowledge injection. Moreover, it achieves reduced latency and cost without compromising accuracy. These results highlight its promise for vertical-domain LLM deployment.

Stratos: An End-to-End Distillation Pipeline for Customized LLMs Under Distributed Cloud Environments

Current methods for editing pre-trained models face significant challenges, primarily high computational costs and limited scalability. Task arithmetic has recently emerged as a promising solution, using simple arithmetic operations—addition and negation—based on task vectors which are the differences between fine-tuned and pre-trained model weights, to efficiently modify model behavior. However, the full potential of task arithmetic remains underexplored, primarily due to limited mechanisms for overcoming optimization stagnation. To address this challenge, we introduce the notion of difference vector, a generalized form of task vectors derived from the historical movements during optimization. Using difference vectors as directed perturbations, we proposed the Difference Vector-based Anisotropic Scaling Iterative algorithm (DV-BASI) to enable a continuous optimization process for task arithmetic methods without relying on any additional modules or components. Notably, by leveraging escapability and directional advantages of difference vectors, the average performance on different tasks of the multi-task model merged by DV-BASI may even outperform models individually fine-tuned. Based on this observation, we extend the application of difference vectors to a feasible fine-tuning method for single-task models. On the practical side, DV-BASI allows expressive searching directions with few learnable parameters and forms a scalable framework.
We also integrate DV-BASI with task arithmetic methods and advanced optimization techniques to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both supervised and unsupervised evaluation protocols.

Escaping Optimization Stagnation: Taking Steps Beyond Task Arithmetic via Difference Vectors

Dexterous grasping remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in robotics. A general-purpose robot must be capable of grasping diverse objects in arbitrary scenarios. However, existing research typically relies on restrictive assumptions, such as single-object settings or limited environments, leading to constrained generalization. We present DexGraspVLA, a hierarchical framework for general dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes based on RGB image perception and language instructions. It utilizes a pre-trained Vision-Language model as the high-level task planner and learns a diffusion-based policy as the low-level Action controller. The key insight to achieve robust generalization lies in iteratively transforming diverse language and visual inputs into domain-invariant representations via foundation models, where imitation learning can be effectively applied due to the alleviation of domain shift. Notably, our method achieves a 90+% success rate under thousands of unseen object, lighting, and background combinations in a ``zero-shot'' environment. Empirical analysis confirms the consistency of internal model behavior across environmental variations, thereby validating our design and explaining its generalization performance. DexGraspVLA also demonstrates free-form long-horizon prompt execution, robustness to adversarial objects and human disturbance, and failure recovery, which are rarely achieved simultaneously in prior work. Extended application to nonprehensile object grasping further proves its generality.

DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping

With the growing role of artificial intelligence in climate and weather research, efficient model training and inference are in high demand. Current models like FourCastNet and AI-GOMS depend heavily on GPUs, limiting hardware independence, especially for Chinese domestic hardware and frameworks. To address this issue, we present a framework for migrating large-scale atmospheric and oceanic models from PyTorch to MindSpore and optimizing for Chinese chips, and evaluating their performance against GPUs. The framework focuses on software-hardware adaptation, memory optimization, and parallelism. Furthermore, the model's performance is evaluated across multiple metrics, including training speed, inference speed, model accuracy, and energy efficiency, with comparisons against GPU-based implementations. Experimental results demonstrate that the migration and optimization process preserves the models' original accuracy while significantly reducing system dependencies and improving operational efficiency by leveraging Chinese chips as a viable alternative for scientific computing. This work provides valuable insights and practical guidance for leveraging Chinese domestic chips and frameworks in atmospheric and oceanic AI model development, offering a pathway toward greater technological independence.

Deploying Atmospheric and Oceanic AI Models on Chinese Hardware and Framework: Migration Strategies, Performance Optimization and Analysis

This paper discusses the integration challenges and
strategies for designing mobile robots, by focusing on the
task-driven, optimal selection of hardware and software to
balance safety, efficiency, and minimal usage of resources
such as costs, energy, computational requirements, and
weight. We emphasize the interplay between perception and
motion planning in decision-making by introducing the
concept of occupancy queries to quantify the perception
requirements for sampling-based motion planners. Sensor and
algorithm performance are evaluated using False Negative
Rate (FNR) and False Positive Rate (FPR) across various
factors such as geometric relationships, object properties,
sensor resolution, and environmental conditions. By
integrating perception requirements with perception
performance, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) approach
is proposed for efficient sensor and algorithm selection
and placement. This forms the basis for a co-design
optimization that includes the robot body, motion planner,
perception pipeline, and computing unit. We refer to this
framework for solving the co-design problem of mobile
robots as CODEI, short for Co-design of Embodied
Intelligence. A case study on developing an Autonomous
Vehicle (AV) for urban scenarios provides actionable
information for designers, and shows that complex tasks
escalate resource demands, with task performance affecting
choices of the autonomy stack. The study demonstrates that
resource prioritization influences sensor
choice: cameras are preferred for cost-effective and
lightweight designs, while lidar sensors are chosen for
better energy and computational efficiency.

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OscuFit: Learning to Fit Osculating Implicit Quadrics for Point Clouds

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