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Stochastic approximation is a powerful class of algorithms with celebrated successes. A large body of previous analysis, however, focuses on stochastic approximations driven by contractive operators, which is not applicable in some important reinforcement learning settings like the average reward setting. This work instead investigates stochastic approximations with merely nonexpansive operators. In particular, we study nonexpansive stochastic approximations with Markovian noise, providing both asymptotic and finite sample analysis.
Key to our analysis are a few novel bounds of noise terms resulting from the Poisson equation. As an application, we prove, for the first time, that the classical tabular average reward temporal difference learning converges to a sample path dependent fixed point.

AAAI 2026

Asymptotic and Finite Sample Analysis of Nonexpansive Stochastic Approximations with Markovian Noise

average reward rl

stochastic approximation

reinforcement learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

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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.

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>

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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.

Time series forecasting is essential across diverse domains including traffic management, industrial control, and economic analysis. While MLP-based methods have gained attention for achieving Transformer-comparable performance with fewer parameters and better robustness, they face critical limitations including loss of weak seasonal signals, capacity constraints in weight-sharing MLPs, and insufficient channel fusion in channel-independent strategies. To address these challenges, we propose MDMLP-EIA (Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention) with three key innovations. First, we develop an adaptive fused dual-domain seasonal MLP that categorizes seasonal signals into strong and weak components. It employs an adaptive zero-initialized channel fusion strategy to minimize noise interference while effectively integrating predictions. Second, we introduce an energy invariant attention mechanism that adaptively focuses on different feature channels within trend and seasonal predictions across time steps. This mechanism maintains constant total signal energy to align with the decomposition-prediction-reconstruction framework and enhance robustness against disturbances. Third, we propose a dynamic capacity adjustment mechanism for channel-independent MLPs. This mechanism scales neuron count with the square root of channel count, ensuring sufficient capacity as channels increase. Extensive experiments across nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that MDMLP-EIA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. Our code will be made available online.

MDMLP-EIA: Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention for Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code is available at: https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time

T3Time: Tri-Modal Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Multi-Head Alignment and Residual Fusion

Flow matching casts sample generation as learning a continuous-time velocity field that transports noise to data. Existing flow matching networks typically predict each point's velocity independently, considering only its location and time along its flow trajectory, and ignoring neighboring points. However, this pointwise approach may overlook correlations between points along the generation trajectory that could enhance velocity predictions, thereby improving downstream generation quality. To address this, we propose Graph Flow Matching (GFM), a lightweight enhancement that decomposes the learned velocity into a reaction term---any standard flow matching network---and a diffusion term that aggregates neighbor information via a graph neural module. This reaction--diffusion formulation retains the scalability of deep flow models while enriching velocity predictions with local context, all at minimal additional computational cost. Operating in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder, GFM consistently improves Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and recall across five image generation benchmarks (LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, FFHQ, AFHQ-Cat, and CelebA-HQ at $256\times256$), demonstrating its effectiveness as a modular enhancement to existing flow matching architectures.

Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fields

Foundation segmentation models, such as SAM and its video-oriented variant SAM2, have achieved remarkable success in natural image and video segmentation. However, their direct application to echocardiography video is challenged by structural uncertainty arising from severe speckle noise and blurry anatomical boundaries. To address this, we propose E³SAM2, a lightweight adaptation framework that introduces a novel entropy-based methodology to explicitly model and mitigate such uncertainty. Specifically, an entropy-guided attention mechanism is introduced to steer the model’s focus toward structurally reliable features, particularly in speckle-dominated regions. Additionally, an entropy regularization loss is introduced to further enhance target-background discrimination. To better resolve indistinct anatomical contours, an edge-aware supervision module is incorporated to inject explicit boundary priors for sharper delineation. These components are efficiently integrated through a global-local feature adapter. Experiments on CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic datasets demonstrate that E³SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art segmentation and clinical estimation performance, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

E³SAM2: Entropy-Aware and Edge-Guided Adaptation of SAM2 for Echocardiography Video Segmentation

Accident anticipation is essential for proactive and safe autonomous driving, where even a brief advance warning can enable critical evasive actions. However, two key challenges hinder real-world deployment: (1) noisy or degraded sensory inputs from weather, motion blur, or hardware limitations, and (2) the need to issue timely yet reliable predictions that balance early alerts with false-alarm suppression. We propose a unified framework that integrates diffusion-based denoising with a time-aware actor-critic model to address these challenges. The diffusion module reconstructs noise-resilient image and object features through iterative refinement, preserving critical motion and interaction cues under sensor degradation. In parallel, the actor-critic architecture leverages long-horizon temporal reasoning and time-weighted rewards to determine the optimal moment to raise an alert, aligning early detection with reliability. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (DAD, CCD, A3D) demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and significant gains in mean time-to-accident, while maintaining robust performance under Gaussian and impulse noise. Qualitative analyses further show that our model produces earlier, more stable, and human-aligned predictions in both routine and highly complex traffic scenarios, highlighting its potential for real-world, safety-critical deployment.

Predict and Resist: Long-Term Accident Anticipation Under Sensor Noise

Performance collapse is an intractable issue of Differentiable Architecture Search (DAS), where severe performance degradation of DAS happens when it trains on different search spaces or datasets. We theoretically analyze the issue from the information bottleneck (IB) perspective, and disclose that a solution to overcome this problem is to seek the bifurcation point of IB tradeoff between compression and prediction of the supernet. To this end, we propose a simple yet highly effective method, namely, Batch Entropy-decay Regularization (BER), to guide the learning of DAS, which restricts compression in DAS by imposing a penalty on the architecture parameters. Comprehensive theoretical analyses demonstrate that BER is able to completely resolve DAS's performance collapse issue. Compared with a number of state-of-the-art DAS variants, BER shows its overwhelmingly better performance on 7 search spaces (i.e., NAS-Bench-201, DARTS, S1-S4, MobileNet-like) and 5 popular datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet1k, PASCAL VOC 2007, and MS COCO 2017).

Understanding and Enhancing Differentiable Architecture Search from Information Bottleneck Perspective

Causal inference has emerged as a promising approach for identifying decisive semantic factors and eliminating spurious correlations in visual representation learning. However, most existing methods rely on latent, data-driven confounder modeling, normally attributing the source of bias to background information while neglecting object-level semantic confusions that commonly occur in complex scenes. This limits their effectiveness in disentangling causal factors from confounding semantics. To address this challenge, we propose an explicit modeling approach for both causal factors and confounders, termed Explicit Modeling Causal Model (EMCM). The proposed framework consists of three key components. The Features Stability Estimation module explicitly models the relationship between visual semantics and class labels by leveraging clustering patterns to perform class-aware separation of causal and confounding factors. It produces class-specific causal factors and confounding factors linked to ambiguous categories. Subsequently, the Discriminative Features Enhancing module integrates causal factors into fused patch features via front-door intervention for stable semantics. In parallel, the Explicit Confounder Modeling and Debiasing Module learns confounders under clear label guidance and derives debiased context features by TDE modeling. This framework leverages two complementary causal perspectives to construct a unified semantic representation that facilitates improved generalization. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that EMCM effectively disentangles causal and confounding factors in complex scenarios, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art causal debiasing methods and text-guided methods in all metrics.

Explicit Modeling of Causal Factors and Confounders for Image Classification

Social biases embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs) raise critical concerns, resulting in representational harms -- unfair or distorted portrayals of demographic groups -- that may be expressed in subtle ways through generated language. Existing evaluation methods often depend on predefined identity-concept associations, limiting their ability to surface new or unexpected forms of bias. In this work, we present the Bias Association Discovery Framework (BADF), a systematic approach for extracting both known and previously unrecognized associations between demographic identities and descriptive concepts from open-ended LLM outputs. Through comprehensive experiments spanning multiple models and diverse real-world contexts, BADF enables robust mapping and analysis of the varied concepts that characterize demographic identities. Our findings advance the understanding of biases in open-ended generation and provide a scalable tool for identifying and analyzing bias associations in LLMs. Data, code, and results are available in the code appendix.

Bias Association Discovery Framework for Open-Ended LLM Generations

Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) is an effective and convenient model deployment solution for addressing various NLP tasks.
Nevertheless, recent research has shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which could lead to significant economic losses for model providers.
To protect the copyright of EaaS, existing methods inject watermark embeddings into text embeddings and use them to detect copyright infringement.
However, current watermarking methods often resist only a subset of attack techniques and fail to provide comprehensive protection.
To this end, we present the region-triggered semantic watermarking framework called RegionMarker, which defines trigger regions within a low-dimensional space and injects watermarks into text embeddings associated with these regions.
By utilizing a secret dimensionality reduction matrix to project onto this subspace and randomly selecting trigger regions, RegionMarker makes it difficult for watermark removal attacks to evade detection.
Furthermore, by embedding watermarks across the entire trigger region and using the text embedding as the watermark, RegionMarker is resilient to both paraphrasing and dimension-perturbation attacks.
Extensive experiments on various datasets show that RegionMarker is effective in resisting different attack methods, thereby protecting the copyright of EaaS.

RegionMarker: A Region-Triggered Semantic Watermarking Framework for Embedding-as-a-Service Copyright Protection

Leveraging the diversity and quantity of data provided by various graph-structured data augmentations while preserving intrinsic semantic information is challenging. Additionally, successive layers in graph neural network (GNN) tend to produce more similar node embeddings, while graph contrastive learning aims to increase the dissimilarity between negative pairs of node embeddings. This inevitably results in a conflict between the message-passing mechanism (MPM) of GNNs and the contrastive learning (CL) of negative pairs via intraviews. In this paper, we propose a conditional distribution learning (CDL) method that learns graph representations from graph-structured data for semisupervised graph classification. Specifically, we present an end-to-end graph representation learning model to align the conditional distributions of weakly and strongly augmented features over the original features. This alignment enables the CDL model to effectively preserve intrinsic semantic information when both weak and strong augmentations are applied to graph-structured data. To avoid the conflict between the MPM and the CL of negative pairs, positive pairs of node representations are retained for measuring the similarity between the original features and the corresponding weakly augmented features. Extensive experiments with several benchmark graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CDL method.

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MDMLP-EIA: Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention for Time Series Forecasting

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