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Automated essay scoring (AES) is a challenging task in cross-prompt settings due to the diversity of scoring criteria. While previous studies have focused on the output of large language models (LLMs) to improve scoring accuracy, we believe activations from intermediate layers may also provide valuable information. To explore this possibility, we evaluated the discriminative power of LLMs’ activations in cross-prompt essay scoring task. Specifically, we used activation to fit probes and further analyzed the effects of different models and input content of LLMs on this discriminative power. By computing the directions of essays across various trait dimensions under different prompts, we analyzed the variation in evaluation perspectives of large language models concerning essay types and traits. Results show that the activations possess strong discriminative power in evaluating essay quality and that LLMs can adapt their evaluation perspectives to different traits and essay types, effectively handling the diversity of scoring criteria in cross-prompt settings.

AAAI 2026

Activations as Features: Probing LLMs for Generalizable Essay Scoring Representations

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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.

3D hand pose estimation that involves accurate estimation of 3D human hand keypoint locations is crucial for many human-computer interaction applications such as augmented reality. However, this task poses significant challenges due to self-occlusion of the hands and occlusions caused by interactions with objects. In this paper, we propose HandMCM to address these challenges. Our HandMCM is a novel method based on the powerful state space model (Mamba). By incorporating modules for local information injection/filtering and correspondence modeling, the proposed correspondence Mamba effectively learns the highly dynamic kinematic topology of keypoints across various occlusion scenarios. Moreover, by integrating multi-modal image features, we enhance the robustness and representational capacity of the input, leading to more accurate hand pose estimation. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios involving severe occlusions. These results highlight the potential of our approach to advance the accuracy and reliability of 3D hand pose estimation in practical applications. Our source code will be made open source upon paper acceptance.

HandMCM: Multi-modal Point Cloud-based Correspondence State Space Model for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) provides artificial intelligence (AI) systems with mathematically rigorous geometric descriptors through Persistent Homology (PH), capturing essential shape characteristics in high-dimensional data. Yet, PH’s combinatorial complexity and sensitivity to outliers hinder its scalability and reliability, especially for Intrinsic PH (IPH) that relies on accurate geodesic distances. While stateof-the-art landmark-based subsampling methods, PH Landmarks, ameliorate computational costs and improve outlier robustness by selecting representative points based on local PH scores, it remain computationally intensive and at low sampling rates struggle to reconstruct the global topology. In this work, we introduce TOPOGRAPH, a simple yet powerful framework that preserves intrinsic topology. The resulting coarsened graph supports efficient IPH computations using Fermat distances. Experiments on both synthetic and realworld datasets show that TOPOGRAPH outperforms stateof-the-art sampling-based methods by achieving an order-ofmagnitude speedup and substantially improved topological fidelity in persistence diagrams, demonstrating its ability for robust and scalable topological data analysis.

TOPOGRAPH: Topology-Preserving Graph Reduction with Adaptive Structure for Persistent Homology

Despite the rapid progress in large language models (LLMs), even sub-billion-scale systems perform at chance level on challenging natural language inference (NLI) benchmarks such as Adversarial Natural Language Inference (ANLI), while training larger models is often impractical due to limited computational resources. We address this parameter-efficiency bottleneck in NLI with a Complex-Vector Token Representation that explicitly decouples each token from its context, and a Token-Context Attention mechanism that updates each token based on the most informative contextual semantics. On ANLI, a 0.8B-parameter Token-Context Attention model achieves higher parameter efficiency (accuracy per parameter) than all 1B and comparable 0.8B self-attention baselines; it also suffers smaller performance degradation under FGSM/PGD attacks and exhibits better transfer performance to SNLI in zero- and few-shot learning. These results suggest that explicitly disentangling token and context offers a viable alternative to standard self-attention for NLI tasks.

Token-Context Attention for NLI: An Alternative to Self-Attention

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are typically trained in specific network environments, and their performance often degrades significantly when deployed in new environments with different attack categories. To address this challenge, we propose and define the task of cross-dataset intrusion detection and design a novel multimodal contrastive learning framework named TriFusion-IDS. This framework represents network traffic from three complementary dimensions: a graph view to capture structural communication patterns, a tabular view to model statistical features, and a textual view to define the semantics of attacks. TriFusion-IDS fuses the graph and tabular representations and aligns them with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a CLIP-style contrastive loss function. This semantics-based alignment mechanism enables the model to overcome the effects of zero-shot categories and thus generalize to new network environments. Our extensive experiments on several mainstream datasets demonstrate that this method significantly outperforms existing baselines in cross-dataset intrusion detection scenarios.

TriFusion-IDS: A Multimodal Graph-Tabular-Text Contrastive Framework for Cross-Dataset Intrusion Detection

Conversational search aims to satisfy users’ complex information needs via multiple-turn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users’ search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational search by fine-tuning a conversational dense retriever with relevance judgments between pairs of context-dependent queries and documents. However, this training paradigm encounters data scarcity issues. To this end, we propose ConvMix, a mixed-criteria framework to augment conversational dense retrieval, which covers more aspects than existing data augmentation frameworks. We design a two-sided relevance judgment augmentation schema in a scalable manner via the aid of large language models. Besides, we integrate the framework with quality control mechanisms to obtain semantically diverse samples and near-distribution supervisions to combine various annotated data. Experimental results on five widely used benchmarks show that the conversational dense retriever trained by our ConvMix framework outperforms previous baseline methods, which demonstrates our superior effectiveness.

ConvMix: A Mixed-Criteria Data Augmentation Framework for Conversational Dense Retrieval

Recent studies on LLM agent scaling have highlighted the potential of Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) to enhance reasoning abilities. However, the critical aspect of role allocation strategies remains underexplored. In this study, we demonstrate that allocating roles with differing viewpoints to specific positions significantly impacts MAD's performance in reasoning tasks. Specifically, we find a novel role allocation strategy, ``Truth Last'', which can improve MAD performance by up to 22\% in reasoning tasks. To address the issue of unknown truth in practical applications, we propose the Multi-Agent Debate Consistency (MADC) strategy, which systematically simulates and optimizes its core mechanisms. MADC incorporates path consistency to assess agreement among independent roles, simulating the role with the highest consistency score as the truth. We validated MADC across a range of LLMs (9 models), including the DeepSeek-R1 Distilled Models, on challenging reasoning tasks. MADC consistently demonstrated advanced performance, effectively overcoming MAD's performance bottlenecks and providing a crucial pathway for further improvements in LLM agent scaling.

Key Decision-Makers in Multi-Agent Debates: Who Holds the Power?

Noun phrases (NPs) in open knowledge bases (OKBs) are not canonicalized, leading to scattered knowledge that necessitates the exploration of the OKB canonicalization task (i.e., clustering synonymous noun phrases into the same group and assigning them a unique identifier). However, existing OKB canonicalization methods typically adhere to a traditional embedding-centered pipeline, which fails to exploit the direct interaction between NPs for pairwise NP similarity calculations, resulting in suboptimal performance and instead relying extensively on external resources. To address these limitations, we introduce a groundbreaking retrieve-read-group paradigm that enables fine-grained pairwise NP similarity calculations by effectively leveraging the direct NP interaction via the reading stage, thereby relieving the reliance on external resources. As an instantiation of this paradigm, we propose DUVK, a novel self-supervised framework that fully integrates the dual-view knowledge involved in OKBs from the relational view and the semantic view. In the retriever component of DUVK, a dual-view cross-training strategy is designed to make two view-specific encoders mutually reinforce each other by capitalizing on the complementary knowledge delivered from both views. Experimental results demonstrate that, even without the need of any external resources, DUVK outperforms all state-of-the-art competitors that rely on such resources.

A Novel Retrieve-Read-Group Paradigm for Open Knowledge Base Canonicalization

Over the past few decades, combinatorial solvers have seen remarkable performance improvements, enabling their practical use in real-world applications.
In some of these applications, ensuring the correctness of the solver's output is critical.
However, the complexity of modern solvers makes them susceptible to bugs in their source code.
In the domain of satisfiability checking (SAT), this issue has been addressed through \emph{proof logging}, where the solver generates a formal proof of the correctness of its solution.
For more expressive problems like MaxSAT, which is the optimization variant of SAT, proof logging had not seen a comparable breakthrough until recently, when the VeriPB proof system was put forwards as a general-purpose proof system for MaxSAT solvers.


In this paper, we show how to add proof logging to state-of-the-art techniques in Branch-and-Bound MaxSAT solving using the VeriPB proof system. 
This includes certifying lookahead methods used in such algorithms as well as advanced encodings of pseudo-Boolean constraints as clauses based on so-called Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs).
We implement these ideas in MaxCDCL, the dominant branch-and-bound solver, and experimentally demonstrate that proof logging is feasible with limited overhead, while proof checking remains a challenge.

Certified Branch-and-Bound MaxSAT Solving

Urban Network Security Games (UNSGs), which model the strategic allocation of limited security resources on city road networks, are critical for urban safety. However, finding a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in large-scale UNSGs is challenging due to their massive and combinatorial action spaces. One common approach to addressing these games is the Policy-Space Response Oracle (PSRO) framework, which requires computing best responses (BR) at each iteration. However, precisely computing exact BRs is impractical in large-scale games, and employing reinforcement learning to approximate BRs inevitably introduces errors that limits the overall effectiveness of the PSRO methods. Recent advancements in leveraging non-convex stochastic optimization to approximate an NE offer a promising alternative to the burdensome BR computation. However, utilizing existing stochastic optimization techniques with an unbiased loss function for UNSGs remains challenging because the action spaces are too vast to be effectively represented by neural networks. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{T}ree-based \textbf{S}tochastic \textbf{O}ptimization (TSO), a framework that bridges the gap between the stochastic optimization paradigm for NE-finding and the demands of UNSGs. Specifically, we employ the tree-based action representation that maps the whole action space onto a tree structure, addressing the challenge faced by neural networks in representing actions when the action space cannot be enumerated. We then incorporate this representation into the loss function and theoretically demonstrate its equivalence to the unbiased loss function. To further enhance the quality of the converged solution, we introduce a sample-and-prune mechanism that reduces the risk of being trapped in suboptimal local optima. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of TSO over other baseline algorithms in addressing the UNSGs.

Tree-Based Stochastic Optimization for Solving Large-Scale Urban Network Security Games

Cooperative perception is critical for autonomous driving, overcoming the inherent limitations of a single vehicle, such as occlusions and constrained fields-of-view. However, current approaches sharing dense Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features are constrained by quadratically-scaling communication costs and the lack of flexibility and interpretability for precise alignment across asynchronous or disparate viewpoints.
While emerging sparse query-based methods offer an alternative, they often suffer from inadequate geometric representations, suboptimal fusion strategies, and training instability.
In this paper, we propose SparseCoop, a fully sparse cooperative perception framework for 3D detection and tracking that completely discards intermediate BEV representations. Our framework is built on a trio of innovations designed for robust and efficient fusion: a kinematic-grounded instance query that uses an explicit state vector with 3D geometry and velocity for precise spatio-temporal alignment; a coarse-to-fine aggregation module that effectively integrates information from both matched and unmatched instances; and a cooperative instance denoising task that provides stable, abundant supervision to accelerate and stabilize training.
Experiments on the V2X-Seq and Griffin datasets demonstrate that SparseCoop achieves new state-of-the-art performance in both 3D detection and tracking. Notably, it delivers this performance with superior computational efficiency and a highly competitive transmission cost, while showing remarkable robustness to real-world challenges like communication latency.

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