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In this work, we introduce the notion of targeting for multi-criteria decision making. The problem involves selecting the best alternatives related to one particular alternative, called the target. We use an axiomatic approach to this problem by establishing properties that any targeting method should satisfy. We present a representation theorem and show that satisfying the main properties of targeting requires aggregating the evaluations of the alternatives related to the target. We propose various candidate targeting methods and examine the properties satisfied by each method.

AAAI 2026

Targeting in Multi-Criteria Decision Making

multi-crireria decision making

targeting

decision

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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.

Multi-turn instruction following is essential for building intelligent conversational systems that can consistently adhere to instructions across dialogue turns. However, existing approaches to enhancing multi-turn instruction following primarily rely on collecting or generating large-scale multi-turn dialogue datasets to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), which treat each response generation as an isolated task and fail to explicitly incorporate multi-turn instruction following into the optimization objectives. As a result, instruction-tuned LLMs often struggle with complex long-distance constraints. In multi-turn dialogues, relational constraints across turns can be naturally modeled as labeled directed edges, making graph structures particularly suitable for modeling multi-turn instruction following. Despite this potential, leveraging graph structures to enhance the multi-turn instruction following capabilities of LLMs remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose GraphIF, a plug-and-play framework that models multi-turn dialogues as directed relation graphs and leverages graph prompts to enhance the instruction following capabilities of LLMs. GraphIF comprises three key components: (1) an agent-based relation extraction module that captures inter-turn semantic relations via action-triggered mechanisms to construct structured graphs; (2) a relation graph prompt generation module that converts structured graph information into natural language prompts; and (3) a response rewriting module that refines initial LLM outputs using the generated graph prompts. Extensive experiments on two long multi-turn dialogue datasets demonstrate that GraphIF can be seamlessly integrated into instruction-tuned LLMs and leads to significant improvements across all four multi-turn instruction-following evaluation metrics, with gains ranging from 7% to 52%.

GraphIF: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models with Relation Graph Prompt

ColBERT introduced a late interaction mechanism that independently encodes queries and documents using BERT, and computes similarity via fine-grained interactions over token-level vector representations. This design enables expressive matching while allowing efficient computation of scores, as the multi-vector document representations could be pre-computed offline. 
ColBERT models distance using a Chamfer-style function: for each query token, it selects the closest document token and sums these distances across all query tokens.

In our work, we explore enhancements to the Chamfer distance function by computing a weighted sum over query token contributions, where weights reflect the token importance. Empirically, we show that this simple extension, requiring only token-weight training while keeping the multi-vector representations fixed, further enhances the expressiveness of late interaction multi-vector mechanism. In particular, on the BEIR benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of 1.28\% in Recall@10 in the zero-shot setting using IDF-based weights, and 3.66\% through few-shot fine-tuning.

Incorporating Token Importance in Multi-Vector Retrieval

Multi-Agent collaboration addresses inherent limitations of individual agent systems, including limited sensing range and occlusion-induced blind spots. Despite significant progress have been achieved, persistent challenges such as constrained communication bandwidth and under-explored subsequent extensions still hinder real-time deployment and further developments of collaborative autonomous driving systems. In this work, we propose ZeRCP, a unified communication-efficient framework that bridges collaborative perception with future scene prediction. Specifically, (i) we devise a plug-and-play request-free spatial filtering module (ZeroR) that eliminates the reliance on request maps while preserving inter-agent spatial complementarity modeling. This approach further reduce communication latency and bandwidth consumptions. (ii) We design a multi-scale pyramidal prediction network anchored by a novel Spatial-Temporal Deformable Attention (STDA) module, extending frame-wise detection to multi-frame predictions. This method adeptly models spatiotemporal dynamics without relying on auto-regressive recursion. We evaluate our method on a large-scale dataset in challenging semantic segmentation and scene prediction tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of ZeRCP in bandwidth-constrained collaboration scenarios and spatiotemporal prediction applications.

ZeRCP: Towards Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception and Future Scene Prediction via Request-Free Spatial Filtering

Machine unlearning has emerged as a promising approach to remove specific knowledge from large language models (LLMs), especially for safety-critical applications. However, existing representation-based methods lack guidance for selecting representation locations to unlearn (RMU), thus lacking precision in unlearning, while probability-based methods are vulnerable to fine-tuning attacks which use unrelated and safe data to fine-tune models. To address these problems, this paper presents an adaptive knowledge guidance and memory perturbation mechanisms, called ALMPU (Adaptive Localized Memory Perturbation Unlearning) which addresses the lack of knowledge guidance in representation-based unlearning methods and mitigates the impact of fine-tuning attacks on unlearned models. Specifically, we apply scaling factors to attention heads and select the most sensitive ones as knowledge guidance. Guided by the previous knowledge localization, we integrate enhanced memory perturbation—which forces the model to preserve specific knowledge—into the standard representation-based unlearning process at these sensitive positions. Through this perturbation mechanism, the model achieves more thorough elimination of the target knowledge. By adding interventions to selected attention heads and explicitly optimizing against fine-tuning attacks during the unlearning process, ALMPU creates a controlled divergence from the original model that is inherently resistant to relearning attempts. Experimental evaluation on the WMDP benchmark demonstrates that ALMPU consistently outperforms baseline methods across different scales of fine-tuning attacks.

A Robust Unlearning Method with Adaptive Knowledge Guidance and Memory Preservation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in applications that require processing information from heterogeneous formats, including text, tables, infoboxes, and knowledge graphs. However, systematic biases toward particular formats may undermine LLMs' ability to integrate heterogeneous data impartially, potentially resulting in reasoning errors and increased risks in downstream tasks. Despite these concerns, it remains uncertain whether such format biases are systematic, which data-level factors contribute to them, and what internal mechanisms in LLMs underlie their emergence.

In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate and analyze the format bias in LLMs. To systematically investigate the aforementioned questions, we conduct a three-stage empirical study by constructing an heterogeneous data conflict scenario for the exploration of bias. The first stage explores the presence and direction of bias across a diverse range of LLMs. The second stage aims to examine how key data-level factors, including information richness, structure quality, and format type, influence these biases. The third stage analyzes how format bias emerges within LLMs' attention patterns and evaluates a lightweight intervention to test its potential mitigability. Based on these investigations, we identify three future research directions to reduce format bias: improving data preprocessing through format sanitization and normalization, introducing inference-time interventions such as attention re-weighting, and developing format-balanced training corpora. These directions will support the design of more robust and fair heterogeneous data processing systems.

Format as a Prior: Quantifying and Analyzing Bias in LLMs for Heterogeneous Data

While classical control theory assumes that the controller has access to measurements of the entire state (or output) at every time instant, this paper investigates a setting where the feedback controller can only access a randomly selected subset of the state vector at each time step. Due to the random sparsification that selects only a subset of the state components at each step, we analyze the stability of the closed-loop system in terms of Asymptotic Mean-Square Stability (AMSS), which ensures that the system state converges to zero in the mean-square sense.  We consider the problem of designing both a feedback gain matrix and a measurement sparsification strategy that minimizes the number of state components required for feedback, while ensuring AMSS of the closed-loop system. Interestingly,  (1)  we provide conditions on the dynamics of the system under which it is possible to find a sparsification strategy, and (2) we propose a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) based algorithm that jointly computes a stabilizing gain matrix, and a randomized sparsification strategy that minimizes the expected number of measured state coordinates while preserving the AMSS. Our approach is then extended to the case where the sparsification probabilities vary across the state components. Based on these theoretical findings, we propose an algorithmic procedure to compute the vector of sparsification parameters, along with the corresponding feedback gain matrix. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the stability properties of control systems that rely solely on randomly selected state measurements. Numerical simulations demonstrate that, in some settings, the system achieves comparable performance to full-state feedback while requiring measurements from only $0.3\%$ of the state coordinates.

Just Few States Are Enough: Randomized Sparse Feedback for Stability of Dynamical Systems

Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are fundamental to many real-world applications, where efficiently producing high-quality solutions is critical. Recent advances in diffusion-based non-autoregressive models have reformulated solving COP as a generative process, achieving promising results. However, these methods still suffer from accumulated errors and high inference costs due to the multi-step stochastic denoising process. To address these issues, we propose EFLOCO, an efficient discrete flow matching method for solving COPs that learns structured and deterministic solution trajectories. EFLOCO replaces noise-driven updates with smooth and guided transitions, thereby improves inference stability and quality. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive time-step scheduler that allocates more concentration to critical transition regions, enabling strong performance under few-step constraints. Experiments on standard TSP and ATSP benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms both learning-based and heuristic baselines in terms of solution quality and inference speed.

Efficient Few-Step Solution Generation via Discrete Flow Matching for Combinatorial Optimization

Document clustering plays an important role in text mining and information retrieval. Existing methods primarily focus on document-intrinsic features, overlooking dataset-level features and consequently failing to construct superior representations. We propose a Contrastive Gaussian Fusion Network (CGFN) that can construct superior representations beyond the original documents.
Specifically, CGFN fuses the Gaussian distributions of neighbor-derived information and intrinsic textual features in the latent space. By incorporating contrastive learning into the fusion process, our proposed method is able to learn high-quality representations while simultaneously mitigating noise and minimizing information loss. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that CGFN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering by robustly capturing holistic distributions and neighbor patterns.

Constructing Superior Representations Beyond the Original Documents via a Contrastive Gaussian Fusion Network for Clustering

Typical deep clustering methods, while achieving notable progress, can only provide one clustering result per dataset. This limitation arises from their assumption of a fixed underlying data distribution, which may fail to meet user needs and provide unsatisfactory clustering outcomes. Our work investigates how multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) can be leveraged to achieve user-driven clustering, emphasizing their adaptability to user-specified semantic requirements. However, directly using MLLM output for clustering has risks for producing unstructured and generic image descriptions instead of feature-specific and concrete ones. To address these issues, our method first discovers that MLLMs' hidden states of text tokens are strongly related to the corresponding features, and leverages these embeddings to perform clusterings from any user-defined criteria. We also employ a lightweight clustering head augmented with pseudo-label learning, significantly enhancing clustering accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate its competitive performance on diverse datasets and metrics. Codes and datasets are available in the anonymous repository.

ESMC: MLLM-Based Embedding Selection for Explainable Multiple Clustering

Table images present unique challenges for effective and efficient understanding due to the need for question-specific focus and the presence of redundant background regions.
Existing Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) approaches often overlook these characteristics, resulting in uninformative and redundant visual representations.
To address these issues, we aim to generate visual features that are both informative and compact for improved table understanding.
We first propose progressive question conditioning, which injects the question into Vision Transformer layers with gradually increasing frequency, considering each layer’s capacity to handle additional information, to generate question-aware visual features.
To reduce redundancy, we introduce a pruning strategy that discards background tokens, thereby improving efficiency.
To mitigate information loss from pruning, we further propose token focusing, a training strategy that encourages the model to concentrate essential information in the retained tokens.
By combining these approaches, we present TabFlash, an efficient and effective MLLM for table understanding.
TabFlash achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both open-source and proprietary MLLMs, while requiring 27\% less FLOPs and 30\% less memory usage compared to the second-best MLLM.

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GraphIF: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models with Relation Graph Prompt

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