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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.

AAAI 2026

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

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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.

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.

TabFlash: Efficient Table Understanding with Progressive Question Conditioning and Token Focusing

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF-trained reward models often exhibit length bias—a systematic tendency to favor longer responses by conflating verbosity with quality. We propose a causal framework for analyzing and mitigating length bias in RLHF reward modeling. Central to our approach is a counterfactual data augmentation method that generates response pairs designed to isolate content quality from verbosity. These counterfactual examples are then used to train the reward model, enabling it to assess responses based on content quality independently of verbosity. Specifically, we construct (1) length-divergent pairs with similar content and (2) content-divergent pairs of similar length. Empirical evaluations show that our method reduces length bias in reward assignment and leads to more concise, content-focused outputs from the policy model. These findings demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively reduces length bias and improves the robustness and content sensitivity of reward modeling in RLHF pipelines.

Mitigating Length Bias in RLHF Through a Causal Lens

High-quality multi-hop instruction data is critical for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in complex long-context scenarios, e.g., long-form reasoning. Nevertheless, there is currently a notable scarcity of such datasets within the community, and existing data synthesis approaches typically fail to provide explicit modeling of intermediate reasoning steps, resulting in unverifiable and potentially erroneous samples. To mitigate above issue, we design the **C**oncept-**G**raph based **M**ulti-hop **I**nstruction **S**ynthesis (CGMIS) framework, which constructs long-form reasoning paths via concept graph traversal and automatically generates verifiable multi-hop data. The CGMIS framework not only guarantees the accuracy and verifiability of the synthesized data but also enables the construction of high-quality multi-hop instruction datasets from arbitrary corpora. Experiments show that fine-tuning with CGMIS-generated data achieves state-of-the-art performance across 13 long-context reasoning tasks on various models, using only 10% of the data volume required by existing methods.

CGMIS: Concept-Graph Based Multi-Hop Instructions Synthesis for Enhancing Long-Context Reasoning

This paper tackles the fundamental failure of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve new tasks when prompted with a sufficient, yet overly complex, set of multi-modal episodes. This failure stems from the model's inability to distill underlying patterns from the noisy experiences. We propose Hypothesis-Driven Reasoning (HDR), a framework that enhances LLM reasoning by building an explicit semantic memory—a set of hypotheses induced from the multi-modal episodes. HDR employs a two-stage pipeline. It first extracts potential factors from the episodes and then iteratively refines hypotheses by generate-verify loop with the factors. We first empirically demonstrates this failure and the potential of sematic memory, showing that oracle hypotheses can boost accuracy from 35.3\% to 92.0\% on a novel task we designed. We then evaluate our HDR, achieving near-oracle performance and significantly outperforming baselines, especially on smaller models. This paper validates a shift from unstructured in-context recall to explicit knowledge abstraction for robust reasoning.

Hypothesis-Driven Reasoning for Large Language Models

In modern software development workflows, the open-source software supply chain significantly contributes to efficient and convenient engineering practices. With increasing system complexity, it has become a common practice to use open-source software as third-party dependencies. However, due to the lack of maintenance for underlying dependencies and insufficient community auditing, ensuring the security of source code and the legitimacy of repository maintainers has become a challenge, particularly in the context of high-stealth backdoor attacks such as the XZ-Util incident. To address these problems, we propose a fine-grained project evaluation framework for backdoor risk assessment in open-source software. Our evaluation framework models highly stealthy backdoor attacks from the attacker’s perspective and defines targeted metrics for each attack stage. Moreover, to overcome the limitations of static analysis in assessing the reliability of repository maintenance activities—such as irregular committer privilege escalation and insufficient review participation—we employ large language models (LLMs) to perform semantic evaluation of code repositories while avoiding reliance on manually crafted patterns. The effectiveness of our framework is validated on 156 high-priority Debian packages, and the experimental results reveal that the current open-source software supply chain is exposed to a series of security risks.

An LLM-based Quantitative Framework for Evaluating High-Stealthy Backdoor Risks in OSS Supply Chains

Although Vision Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong perceptual abilities and impressive visual reasoning, they struggle with attention to detail and precise action planning in complex, dynamic environments, leading to subpar performance. Real-world tasks typically require complex interactions, advanced spatial reasoning, long-term planning, and continuous strategy refinement, usually necessitating understanding the physics rules of the target scenario. However, evaluating these capabilities in real-world scenarios is often prohibitively expensive. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepPHY, a novel benchmark framework designed to systematically evaluate VLMs' understanding and reasoning about fundamental physical principles through a series of challenging simulated environments. DeepPHY integrates multiple physical reasoning environments of varying difficulty levels and incorporates fine-grained evaluation metrics. Our evaluation finds that even state-of-the-art VLMs struggle to translate descriptive physical knowledge into precise, predictive control.
The associated code and dataset will be released publicly.

DeepPhy: Benchmarking Agentic VLMs on Physical Reasoning

Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) aims to generalize a classification model learned on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the target label space is a subset of the source label space. In PDA tasks, existing methods typically achieve transferability through distribution alignment in a statistical framework, and discriminability through geometric modeling. These two aspects are often treated as separate frameworks, which severs the intrinsic connection between them.
To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework termed Geometry-aware Conditional Alignment (GCA), which is derived from theoretical insights of MCRR. GCA collaboratively achieves conditional alignment and orthogonal discriminability in a unified framework, making the learned features more interpretable in both statistical and geometric aspects.
Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of GCA.

GCA: Geometry-aware Conditional Alignment for Partial Domain Adaptation with Coding Rate Reduction

Anomaly detection in dynamic graphs aims to capture the dynamic evolution characteristics of graphs, and then identify abnormal behaviors that deviate from normal patterns. However, previous studies fail to decouple periodic and bursty information during the time encoding process, which hinders their performances. In addition, most existing methods use attention mechanisms to capture the importance of time points. They fail to leverage the normal and abnormal characteristics in the frequency domain. To address the above issues, we propose a model that integrates multi-scale Frequency encoding with Time-frequency Attention for Anomaly Detection in dynamic graphs, named FreqTAD. We design a multi-scale frequency encoder that decomposes time series into distinct periodic and bursty components. Moreover, we present an effective time-frequency attention mechanism that focuses on frequency components to differentiate frequency-domain features of normal and abnormal behaviors. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of FreqTAD in both anomaly detection accuracy and computational efficiency.

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

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