Singapore

We study a general framework of optimization with the aim to compute fair solutions in settings with a set of agents whose valuations are aggregated using an aggregation function. The strength of our framework lies (1) in its generality and (2) in the fact that we leverage the power of ex-ante fairness, a concept that has recently gained much attention in the scope of fair allocation and fairness in AI in general. More precisely, in our setting there are $n$ set functions $f_1,\ldots, f_n$ (e.g., the valuation functions of $n$ agents) that are aggregated using an aggregation function $g$ (e.g., the minimum, Nash social welfare, $p$-norm). The power of ex-ante fairness is obtained by allowing as feasible solutions not simply a finite set of sets $\mathcal S$, but instead a set of distributions $\Pi$ over $\mathcal S$.
The goal in our setting is then to find a probability distribution $p\in \Pi$ that maximizes the value resulting from aggregating (using $g$) the $n$ \emph{expected values} $\mathbb{E}_{S\sim \vec{p}} [f_i(S)]$ obtained when sampling a set $S\in \mathcal S$ according to the distribution $\vec{p}$. We stress that this is different from maximizing the expected value of $g$ (ex-post fairness) and typically allows for much fairer solutions. We give three different greedy algorithms for three different settings of this framework and prove that they achieve constant approximation guarantees under certain realistic assumptions. For some of the settings, we show that these approximation guarantees are tight. Specific scenarios that can be modelled using our framework include fair information diffusion in social networks, fair submodular matching problems and ex-ante versions of item assignment problems.

AAAI 2026

Greedily Maximizing Ex-Ante Fairness

greedy algorithms

ex-ante fairness

submodular optimization

randomness

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.

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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.

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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.

Image-to-image translation models have achieved notable success in converting images across visual domains and are increasingly used for medical tasks such as predicting post-operative outcomes and modeling disease progression. However, most existing methods primarily aim to match the target distribution and often neglect spatial correspondences between the source and translated images. This limitation can lead to structural inconsistencies and hallucinations, undermining the reliability and interpretability of the predictions. These challenges are accentuated in clinical applications by the stringent requirement for anatomical accuracy. In this work, we present TraceTrans, a novel deformable image translation model designed for post-operative prediction that generates images aligned with the target distribution while explicitly revealing spatial correspondences with the pre-operative input. The framework employs an encoder for feature extraction and dual decoders for predicting spatial deformations and synthesizing the translated image. The predicted deformation field imposes spatial constraints on the generated output, ensuring anatomical consistency with the source. Extensive experiments on medical cosmetology and brain MRI datasets demonstrate that TraceTrans delivers accurate and interpretable post-operative predictions, highlighting its potential for reliable clinical deployment. (Github link)

TraceTrans: Translation and Spatial Tracing for Surgical Prediction

Training general agents to follow complex instructions (_tasks_) in intricate environments (_levels_) remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning. Random sampling of task-level pairs often produces unsolvable combinations, highlighting the need to co-design tasks and levels. While unsupervised environment design (UED) has proven effective at automatically designing level curricula, prior work has only considered a fixed task. We present ATLAS (Aligning Tasks and Levels for Autocurricula of Specifications), a novel method that generates _joint autocurricula_ over tasks and levels. Our approach builds upon UED to automatically produce solvable yet challenging task-level pairs for policy training. To evaluate ATLAS and drive progress in the field, we introduce a _benchmark_ suite that models tasks as reward machines in Minigrid levels. Experiments demonstrate that ATLAS vastly outperforms random sampling approaches, particularly when sampling solvable pairs is unlikely. We further show that mutations leveraging the structure of both tasks and levels accelerate convergence to performant policies.

Beyond Fixed Tasks: Unsupervised Environment Design for Task-Level Pairs

Constructing historical language models (LMs) plays a crucial role in aiding archaeological provenance studies and understanding ancient cultures. However, existing resources present major challenges for training effective LMs on historical texts. First, the scarcity of historical language samples renders unsupervised learning approaches based on large text corpora highly inefficient, hindering effective pre-training. Moreover, due to the considerable temporal gap and complex evolution of ancient scripts, the absence of comprehensive character encoding schemes limits the digitization and computational processing of ancient texts, particularly in early Chinese writing. To address these challenges, we introduce InteChar, a unified and extensible character list that integrates unencoded oracle bone characters with traditional and modern Chinese. InteChar enables consistent digitization and representation of historical texts, providing a foundation for robust modeling of ancient scripts. To evaluate the effectiveness of InteChar, we construct the Oracle Corpus Set (OracleCS), an ancient Chinese corpus that combines expert-annotated samples with LLM-assisted data augmentation, centered on Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. Extensive experiments show that models trained with InteChar on OracleCS achieve substantial improvements across various historical language understanding tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our approach and establishing a solid foundation for future research in ancient Chinese NLP.

InteChar: A Unified Oracle Bone Character List for Ancient Chinese Language Modeling

The introduction of diffusion models has brought significant advances to the field of audio-driven talking head generation. However, the extremely slow inference speed severely limits the practical implementation of diffusion-based talking head generation models. In this study, we propose READ, the first real-time diffusion-transformer-based talking head generation framework. Our approach first learns a spatiotemporal highly compressed video latent space via a temporal VAE, significantly reducing the token count to accelerate generation. To achieve better audio-visual alignment within this compressed latent space, a pre-trained Speech Autoencoder (SpeechAE) is proposed to generate temporally compressed speech latent codes corresponding to the video latent space. These latent representations are then modeled by a carefully designed Audio-to-Video Diffusion Transformer (A2V-DiT) backbone for efficient talking head synthesis. Furthermore, to ensure temporal consistency and accelerated inference in extended generation, we propose a novel asynchronous noise scheduler (ANS) for both the training and inference process of our framework. The ANS leverages asynchronous add-noise and asynchronous motion-guided generation in the latent space, ensuring consistency in generated video clips. Experimental results demonstrate that READ outperforms state-of-the-art methods by generating competitive talking head videos with significantly reduced runtime, achieving an optimal balance between quality and speed while maintaining robust metric stability in long-time generation.

READ: Real-time and Efficient Asynchronous Diffusion for Audio-driven Talking Head Generation

Translating non-invasive signals such as photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG) into clinically meaningful signals like arterial blood pressure (ABP) is vital for continuous, low-cost healthcare monitoring. However, temporal misalignment in multimodal signal transformation impairs waveform accuracy, especially in capturing critical features like ABP peaks. Conventional synchronization methods often rely on strict similarity assumptions or manual tuning, while existing Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) approaches are ineffective against time-shifted supervision, either discarding excessive data or failing to correct label shifts. To address this, we propose ShiftSyncNet, a meta-learning-based bi-level optimization framework designed to automatically mitigate performance degradation due to time misalignment. It comprises a transformation network (TransNet) and a time-shift correction network (SyncNet), which learns time offsets between training pairs and applies Fourier phase shifts to align supervision signals. Experiments on one real-world industrial dataset and two public datasets show that ShiftSyncNet outperforms baselines by 9.4\%, 6.0\%, and 12.8\%, respectively. Results highlight its effectiveness in correcting time shifts, improving label quality, and enhancing transformation accuracy under diverse misalignments—attributable to SyncNet's label correction capabilities within meta-learning framework.

Lost in Time? A Meta-Learning Framework for Time-Shift-Tolerant Physiological Signal Transformation

Specializing Large Language Models for educational domains is a key frontier in creating personalized learning tools. The central challenge is not data scarcity but its abundance: efficiently selecting a curated data subset from vast corpora to enhance specialized skills and foster generalization, without degrading existing abilities. Existing data selection paradigms, relying on superficial semantic similarity or model training dynamics, often lack a principled framework to identify data that promotes true cognitive growth. Our work proposes a paradigm shift from leveraging indirect proxies of learning value, such as semantic similarity and training dynamics, towards a framework that performs a direct, cognitive-level modeling of the learner's state. We introduce CASS, a novel framework that implements this cognitive approach through a clear pipeline, moving from an initial Diagnosis to the ultimate goal of expanding the model's cognitive frontier. First, CASS diagnoses the LLM's cognitive frontier using Multidimensional Item Response Theory. Leveraging this diagnosis, it then employs Fisher Information to select a data subset situated at LLM's cognitive frontier that offers maximum informational gain. Finally, the model is fine-tuned on this curated data using a structured, easy-to-hard curriculum to ensure effective learning. Experiments on our new multi-subject dataset show that models trained with CASS not only achieve superior accuracy in the target domain but also exhibit enhanced generalization. CASS provides a more efficient, effective, and theoretically-grounded paradigm for building expert educational LLMs.

From Diagnosis to Generalization: A Cognitive Approach to Data Selection for Educational LLMs

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) lies at the core of many real-world combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, traditionally solved by branch-and-bound (B\&B). 
A key driver influencing B\&B solvers efficiency is the variable selection heuristic that guides branching decisions. 
Looking to move beyond static, hand-crafted heuristics, recent work has explored adapting traditional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the B\&B setting, aiming to learn branching strategies tailored to specific MILP distributions. 
In parallel, RL agents have achieved remarkable success in board games, a very specific type of combinatorial problems, by leveraging environment simulators to plan via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS).
Building on these developments, we introduce Plan-and-Branch-and-Bound (PlanB\&B), a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agent that leverages a learned internal model of the B\&B dynamics to discover improved branching strategies. 
Computational experiments empirically validate our approach, with our MBRL branching agent outperforming previous state-of-the-art RL methods across four standard MILP benchmarks.

Planning in Branch-and-Bound: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Exact Combinatorial Optimization

Chinese Grammar Error Correction (CGEC) aims to identify and correct grammatical errors in Chinese sentences. Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is a popular current method. However, we have observed a significant flaw: LLMs learn grammatical knowledge but often fail to explicitly use specific grammatical concepts to correct erroneous sentences, leading to multiple corrections without a clear indication of which is the most reliable. Humans possess an "intuitive thinking" mode, which allows them to quickly decide which correction is more reliable based on experience and intuition. To address this deficiency in LLMs, we propose the Expanding Intuitive Thinking Model (ExIT). ExIT extends the thinking process of LLMs for CGEC, providing them with a human-like rapid decision-making process. This enables LLMs to quickly select a more reliable correction from multiple alternatives based on experience and intuition. Unlike the LLM decoding process, which focuses only on the trustworthiness of local tokens, this is a global thinking process concerning the erroneous sentence and its correction. ExIT is a lightweight model that performs rapid computations without significantly increasing overhead. Our experimental results on CGEC datasets demonstrate that the proposed ExIT can substantially unleash the error correction potential of LLMs.

Intuitive Thinking: Expanding Large Language Models’ Thinking for Rapid Decision-Making on Candidate Corrections in Chinese Grammar Error Correction

Adverse weather conditions—such as rain, fog, and snow—significantly degrade LiDAR point cloud quality, causing substantial performance deterioration in detection models trained on clean data. To address this, we propose LTDNet, a novel point cloud quality improvement net-work that restores degraded LiDAR scans by learning an end-to-end mapping from corrupted to clean geometry. LTDNet leverages position encoding, spatial–frequency joint feature extraction, weather-aware refinement, and probabilistic pruning to effectively recover structural in-tegrity while suppressing weather-induced noise. To fa-cilitate standardized evaluation, we introduce IQA3D, a new benchmark comprising both synthetic and real-world sequences under adverse weather. This dual-design benchmark serves two complementary purposes: synthet-ic sequences provide pixel-wise correspondences between degraded and clean point clouds for quantitatively as-sessing restoration fidelity, while real-world sequences enable evaluation of the practical impact of improvement methods on downstream 3D object detection under au-thentic weather conditions. This makes IQA3D particular-ly suitable for jointly measuring both perceptual quality and task-level robustness of point cloud improvement models. Extensive experiments on IQA3D demonstrate that LTDNet significantly improves detection perfor-mance across various state-of-the-art 3D detectors and three tested weather conditions, making it a practical and effective solution for robust LiDAR-based detection.

Weather-Robust LiDAR Perception: Point Cloud Restoration from Adverse Weather

While diffusion model fine-tuning offers a powerful approach for customizing pre-trained models to generate specific objects, it frequently suffers from overfitting when training samples are limited, compromising both generalization capability and output diversity. This paper tackles the challenging yet most impactful task of adapting a diffusion model using just a single concept image, as single-image customization holds the greatest practical potential. We introduce *T-LoRA*, a **T**imestep-Dependent **Lo**w-**R**ank **A**daptation framework specifically designed for diffusion model personalization. In our work we show that higher diffusion timesteps are more prone to overfitting than lower ones, necessitating a timestep-sensitive fine-tuning strategy. *T-LoRA* incorporates two key innovations: (1) a dynamic fine-tuning strategy that adjusts rank-constrained updates based on diffusion timesteps, and (2) a weight parametrization technique that ensures independence between adapter components through orthogonal initialization. Extensive experiments show that *T-LoRA* and its individual components outperform standard LoRA and other diffusion model personalization techniques. They achieve a superior balance between concept fidelity and text alignment, highlighting the potential of *T-LoRA* in data-limited and resource-constrained scenarios.

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