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A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents&#39; behaviours to avoid undesirable outcomes. The paper considers two types of laws: useful laws that, if followed, completely eliminate the undesirable outcomes and gap-free laws that guarantee that at least one agent can be held responsible each time an undesirable outcome occurs. In both cases, we study the problem of finding a law that achieves the desired result by imposing the minimum restrictions.

We prove that, for both types of laws, the minimisation problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of one-shot concurrent interactions. We also show that the approximation algorithm for the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs could be used to efficiently approximate the minimum laws in both cases.

AAAI 2026

A Graph-Theoretical Perspective on Law Design for Multiagent Systems

A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents' behaviours to avoid undesirable outcomes. The paper considers two types of laws: useful laws that, if followed, completely eliminate the undesirable outcomes and gap-free laws that guarantee that at least one agent can be held responsible each time an undesirable outcome occurs. In both cases, we study the problem of finding a law that achieves the desired result by imposing the minimum restrictions.

We prove that, for both types of laws, the minimisation problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of one-shot concurrent interactions. We also show that the approximation algorithm for the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs could be used to efficiently approximate the minimum laws in both cases.

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.

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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.

Oracle Bone Script, East Asia's earliest mature writing system from over 3,500 years ago, encodes ancient cognition through visual metaphors, yet remains largely undeciphered and inaccessible, severing modern society from its cultural roots. Traditional AI methods, while accurate in classification, treat glyphs as opaque data, neglecting their pictographic essence and failing to foster public understanding—exacerbating a heritage crisis amid linguistic evolution.
We pioneer a paradigm shift toward AI-driven cultural democratization, introducing OracleVis, the first human-validated multimodal dataset of glyph-image-explanation triplets, curated through expert collaborations to overcome data scarcity, bias, and incompleteness in archaeological sources. Building on this, OBS-VM, an explainability-centric multimodal large language model fine-tuned on Qwen 2-VL-7B, models pictographic reasoning by balancing semantic fidelity with interpretive transparency, transforming black-box predictions into cognition-aligned narratives.
Rigorous evaluations, including benchmarks and a user study with 24 non-experts, reveal our system's superiority: it outperforms GPT-4o by 35.3\% in pictographic rationality and 13.8\% in recognition accuracy, while interactive learning boosts knowledge gains (+5.5 vs. +1.7), interest (+1.9 vs. +0.4), and confidence (+2.0 vs. +0.3) over static methods. This work illuminates AI's potential to bridge ancient wisdom and contemporary audiences, redefining heritage preservation as an inclusive, socially impactful endeavor that turns cultural alienation into enlightened engagement.

Explainable Oracle Bone Script Recognition via Multimodal Pictographic Reasoning

Summarizing event sequences is a key aspect of data mining. Most existing methods neglect conditional dependencies and focus on discovering sequential patterns only. In this paper, we study the problem of discovering both conditional and unconditional dependencies from event sequences. We do so by discovering rules of the form $X \rightarrow Y$ where $X$ and $Y$ are sequential patterns. Rules like these are simple to understand and provide a clear description of the relation between the antecedent and the consequent. To discover succinct and non-redundant sets of rules we formalize the problem in terms of the Minimum Description Length principle. As the search space is enormous and does not exhibit helpful structure, we propose the SEQRET method to discover high-quality rule sets in practice. Through extensive empirical evaluation we show that unlike the state of the art, SEQRET ably recovers the ground truth on synthetic datasets and finds useful rules from real datasets.

SEQRET: Mining Rule Sets from Event Sequences

The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to be robust, i.e., they perform well on perturbations of the MDP and (2) to satisfy additional structural constraints regarding, e.g., their representation or implementation cost. Computing such robust and constrained policies is indeed computationally more challenging.
This paper contributes the first approach to effectively compute robust policies subject to arbitrary structural constraints using a flexible and efficient framework. We achieve flexibility by allowing to express our constraints in a first-order theory over a set of MDPs, while the root for our efficiency lies in the tight integration of satisfiability solvers to handle the combinatorial nature of the problem and probabilistic model checking algorithms to handle the analysis of MDPs. Experiments on a few hundred benchmarks demonstrate the feasibility for constrained and robust policy synthesis and the competitiveness with state-of-the-art methods for various fragments of the problem.

Constrained and Robust Policy Synthesis with Satisfiability-Modulo-Probabilistic-Model-Checking

Reconstructing dynamic objects from monocular RGB-D video is critical for advancing 3D vision applications and enhancing user experience. 
However, monocular RGB-D video provides limited 3D observations, making the reconstruction of unobserved regions highly under-constrained. 
Despite recent advances that combine neural implicit surfaces with diffusion models, the inherent limitations of implicit representations and the lack of effective guidance in diffusion priors lead to blurry appearance and inaccurate geometry in dynamic object reconstruction.
To address the issue, we present MGD, which leverages scene-adaptive diffusion priors and Mesh-guided Gaussians for realistic rendering and geometrically accurate reconstruction of dynamic objects, including unobserved regions.
The dynamic 3D objects reconstructed by MGD are represented using our proposed Mesh-guided Gaussians, which leverage global and local Gaussians to capture large-scale deformations and fine-grained appearance details, respectively.
Additionally, in order to utilize depth information, we integrate a depth ControlNet into the diffusion model and conduct scene-adaptive fine-tuning. We design a self-generated image-pair strategy to produce image pairs used for fine-tuning. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both high-fidelity reconstruction and structural completeness, while maintaining real-time efficiency during training and rendering.

MGD:Mesh-guided Gaussians with Diffusion Priors for Dynamic Objects Reconstruction from Monocular RGB-D Video

We present MIRA (Multimodal Interventional RAdiology evaluation), a comprehensive benchmark designed for developing and evaluating large multimodal models on expert-level interventional radiology tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge and advanced visual reasoning capabilities. Unlike existing medical benchmarks that primarily provide binary labels without contextual depth, MIRA offers diverse question formats, including open-ended, closed-ended, single-choice, and multiple-choice categories, each accompanied by detailed expert-validated explanations. The benchmark incorporates approximately 184K high-quality medical images spanning multiple imaging modalities with 1.2M meticulously generated question-answer pairs across various anatomical regions. These pairs were created through a sophisticated cascade methodology involving expert interventional radiologists at both the data collection and validation stages. Our comprehensive evaluation, encompassing zero-shot testing and fine-tuning experiments of large multimodal models, revealing significant performance gaps between AI systems and human specialists. Fine-tuning experiments demonstrates substantial improvements, with models achieving up to 0.80 accuracy on single-choice questions. MIRA establishes a challenging benchmark that suggests promising directions for developing specialized clinical AI systems for interventional radiology.

MIRA: Evaluating Multimodal AI on Complex Clinical Reasoning in Interventional Radiology

Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

Graph-Conditional Flow Matching for Relational Data Generation

Background: Traditional supervised learning (SL) assumes data points are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.), which overlooks dependencies in real-world data. Reinforcement learning (RL), in contrast, models dependencies through state transitions.

Objectives: This study aims to bridge SL and RL by reformulating SL problems as RL tasks, enabling the application of RL techniques to a wider range of SL scenarios. We aim to model SL data as interconnected, and develop novel temporal difference (TD) algorithms that can accommodate diverse data types. Our objectives are to (1) establish conditions where TD outperforms ordinary least squares (OLS), (2) provide convergence guarantees for the generalized TD algorithm, and (3) validate the approach empirically using synthetic and real-world datasets.

Methods: We reformulate traditional SL as a RL problem by modeling data points as a Markov Reward Process (MRP). We then introduce a concept analogous to the inverse link function in generalized linear models, allowing our TD algorithm to handle various data types. Our analysis, grounded in variance estimation, identifies conditions where TD outperforms OLS. We establish a convergence guarantee by conceptualizing the TD update rule as a generalized Bellman operator. Empirical validation begins with synthetic data progressively matching theoretical assumptions to verify our analysis, followed by evaluations on real-world datasets to demonstrate practical utility.

Results: Our theoretical analysis shows that TD can outperform OLS in estimation accuracy when data noise is correlated. Our approach generalizes across various loss functions and SL datasets. We prove that the Bellman operator in our TD framework is a contraction, ensuring convergence for both expected and stochastic TD updates. Empirically, TD outperforms SL baselines when data aligns with its assumptions, remains competitive across diverse datasets, and is robust to hyperparameter choices.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates that SL can be reformulated as a problem of interconnected data modeled by an MRP, effectively solved using TD learning. Our generalized TD is theoretically sound, with convergence guarantees, and practically effective. It generalizes OLS, offering superior performance on correlated data. This work enables RL techniques to benefit SL tasks, offering a pathway for future advancements.

An MRP Formulation for Supervised Learning: Generalized Temporal Difference Learning Models

Molecular representation learning, a cornerstone for downstream tasks like molecular captioning and molecular property prediction, heavily relies on Graph Neural Networks (GNN). However, GNN suffers from the over-smoothing problem, where node-level features collapse in deep GNN layers. While existing feature projection methods with cross-attention have been introduced to mitigate this issue, they still perform poorly in deep features. This motivated our exploration of using Mamba as an alternative projector for its ability to handle complex sequences. However, we observe that while Mamba excels at preserving global topological information from deep layers, it neglects fine-grained details in shallow layers. The capabilities of mamba and cross-attention exhibit a global-local trade-off. To resolve this critical global-local trade-off, we propose Hierarchical and Structure-Aware Network (HSA-Net), a novel framework with two modules that enables a hierarchical feature projection and fusion. Firstly, a Hierarchical Adaptive Projector (HAP) module is introduced to process features from different graph layers. It learns to dynamically switch between a cross attention projector for shallow layers and a structure-aware Graph-Mamba projector for deep layers, producing high-quality, multi-level features. Secondly, to adaptively merge these multi-level features, we design a Source-Aware Fusion (SAF) Module, which flexibly selects fusion experts based on the characteristics of the aggregation features, ensuring a precise and effective final representation fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HSA-Net framework quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The demos of our method are attached in the supplementary material.

HSA-Net: Hierarchical and Structure-Aware Framework for Efficient and Scalable Molecular Language Modeling

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced long-chain reasoning capabilities over standard large language models (LLMs). However, LRMs often produce unnecessarily lengthy outputs even for simple queries, leading to inefficiencies or even accuracy degradation compared to LLMs. To address this, we propose CP-Router, a training-free, model-agnostic routing framework that dynamically selects between an LLM and an LRM, demonstrated with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) prompts. The routing decision is guided by the prediction uncertainty estimates derived via Conformal Prediction (CP), which provides rigorous coverage guarantees. To improve uncertainty differentiation across inputs, we introduce Full and Binary Entropy (FBE), a novel entropy-based criterion that adaptively selects the appropriate CP threshold. Experiments across MCQA and QA benchmarks—including mathematics, logical reasoning, and Chinese chemistry—demonstrate that CP-Router efficiently reduces token usage while maintaining or even improving accuracy compared to using LRM alone. We further demonstrate the generality and robustness of CP-Router by extending it to diverse model pairings beyond the LLM–LRM setting.

CP-Router: An Uncertainty-Aware Router Between LLM and LRM

Configuring the parameters of additive manufacturing processes for metal alloys is a challenging problem due to complex relationships between input parameters (e.g., laser power, scan speed, and material feed rate) and quality of printed outputs. The standard trial-and-error approach to find feasible parameter configurations is highly inefficient because validating each input configuration is expensive in terms of resources (physical and human labor) and the configuration space is very large. This paper applies the general principle of AI-driven adaptive experimental design for optimization to the more challenging problem of discovering feasible configurations. The key idea is to build a probabilistic surrogate model from past experiments to intelligently select a small batch of input configurations for validation in each iteration. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, we deploy it for Directed Energy Deposition (DED) process to print GRCop-42, a high-performance copper–chromium–niobium alloy developed by NASA for extreme-temperature aerospace applications. Within weeks, our approach yielded multiple defect-free outputs across a range of laser powers—dramatically reducing time-to-result and resource expenditure compared to four months of manual experimentation by our collaborators with little to no success. By enabling high-quality GRCop-42 fabrication on readily available infrared laser platforms for the first-time, we democratize access to this critical alloy, paving the way for cost-effective, decentralized production of rocket engine chambers, heat exchangers, and other high-heat-flux components.

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