Singapore

Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to
unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical
responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of
muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behavior, we
propose a novel design of a robotic leg utilizing fibre
jammed structures as passive compliant mechanisms to
achieve variable joint stiffness and damping. We developed
multimaterial fibre jammed tendons with tunable mechanical
properties, which can be 3-D printed in one-go without need
for assembly. Through extensive numerical simulations and
experimentation, we demonstrate the usefulness of these
tendons for shock absorbance and maintaining joint
stability. We investigate how they could be used
effectively in a multijoint robotic leg by evaluating the
relative contribution of each tendon to the overall
stiffness of the leg. Further, we showcase the potential of
these jammed structures for legged locomotion, highlighting
how morphological properties of the tendons can be used to
enhance stability in robotic legs.

AAAI 2026

A Compliant Robotic Leg Based on Fibre Jamming

technical paper

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.

Energy usage prediction is important for various real-world applications, including grid management, infrastructure planning, and disaster response. Although a plethora of deep learning approaches have been proposed to perform this task, most of them either overlook the essential spatial correlations across households or fail to scale to individualized prediction, making them less effective for accurate fine-grained user-level prediction. In addition, due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of energy usage caused by various factors such as extreme weather events, quantifying uncertainty for reliable prediction is also significant, but it has not been fully explored in existing work. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called TrustEnergy for accurate and reliable user-level energy usage prediction. There are two key technical components in TrustEnergy, (i) a Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Representation module to efficiently capture both macro and micro energy usage patterns with a novel memory-augmented spatiotemporal graph neural network, and (ii) an innovative Sequential Conformalized Quantile Regression module to dynamically adjust uncertainty bounds to ensure valid prediction intervals over time, without making strong assumptions about the underlying data distribution. We implement and evaluate our TrustEnergy framework by working with an electricity provider in Florida, and the results show our TrustEnergy can achieve a 5.4% increase in prediction accuracy and 5.7% improvement in uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

TrustEnergy: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Reliable User-level Energy Usage Prediction

Dense retrieval has become a foundational paradigm in modern search systems, especially in short-video platforms. However, most industrial systems adopt a self-reinforcing training pipeline that relies on historically exposed user interactions for supervision. This paradigm inevitably leads to a filter bubble effect, where potentially relevant but previously unseen content is excluded from the training signal, biasing the model toward narrow and conservative retrieval. In this paper, we present CroPS (Cross-Perspective Positive Samples), a novel retrieval data engine designed to alleviate this problem by introducing diverse and semantically meaningful positive examples from multiple perspectives. CroPS enhances training with positive signals derived from user query reformulation behavior (query-level), engagement data in recommendation streams (system-level), and world knowledge synthesized by large language models (knowledge-level). To effectively utilize these heterogeneous signals, we introduce a Hierarchical Label Assignment (HLA) strategy and a corresponding H-InfoNCE loss that together enable fine-grained, relevance-aware optimization. Extensive experiments on a large-scale commercial short-video search platform demonstrate that CroPS significantly outperforms strong baselines both offline and in live A/B tests, achieving superior retrieval performance and reducing query reformulation rates. CroPS is now fully deployed in a production system, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

CroPS: Improving Dense Retrieval with Cross-Perspective Positive Samples in Short-Video Search

Recent work suggests that certain neural network architectures---particularly recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and implicit neural networks (INNs)---are capable of logical extrapolation. When trained on easy instances of a task, these networks (henceforth: logical extrapolators) can generalize to more difficult instances. Previous research has hypothesized that logical extrapolators do so by learning a scalable, iterative algorithm for the given task which converges to the solution. We examine this idea more closely in the context of a single task: maze solving. By varying test data along multiple axes --- not just maze size --- we show that models introduced in prior work fail in a variety of ways, some expected and others less so. It remains uncertain whether any of these models has truly learned an algorithm. However, we provide evidence that a certain RNN has approximately learned a form of `deadend-filling'. We show that training these models on more diverse data addresses some failure modes but, paradoxically, does not improve logical extrapolation. We also analyze convergence behavior, and show that models explicitly trained to converge to a fixed point are likely to do so when extrapolating, while models that are not may exhibit more exotic limiting behavior such as limit cycles, _even when_ they correctly solve the problem. Our results (i) show that logical extrapolation is not immune to the problem of _goal misgeneralization_, and (ii) suggest that analyzing the _dynamics_ of extrapolation may yield insights into designing better logical extrapolators.

On Logical Extrapolation for Mazes with Recurrent and Implicit Networks

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to adversarial exploitation of cognitive biases---systematic deviations from rational judgment. Unlike prior studies focusing on isolated biases, this work highlights the overlooked power of multi-bias interactions in undermining LLM safeguards. Specifically, we propose CognitiveAttack, a novel red-teaming framework that adaptively selects optimal ensembles from 154 human behavioral economics-defined cognitive biases, engineering them into adversarial prompts to effectively compromise LLM safety mechanisms. Experimental results reveal systemic vulnerabilities across 30 mainstream LLMs, particularly open-source variants. CognitiveAttack achieves a substantially higher attack success rate than the SOTA black-box method PAP (60.1% vs. 31.6%), exposing critical limitations in current defenses. Through quantitative analysis of successful jailbreaks, we further identify vulnerability patterns in safety-aligned LLMs under synergistic cognitive biases, validating multi-bias interactions as a potent yet underexplored attack vector. This work introduces a novel interdisciplinary perspective by bridging cognitive science and LLM safety, paving the way for more robust and human-aligned AI systems.

Exploiting Synergistic Cognitive Biases to Bypass Safety in LLMs

Many real-world decision-making problems involve optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously, rendering the selection of the most preferred solution a non-trivial problem: All Pareto optimal solutions are viable candidates, and it is typically up to a decision maker to select one for implementation based on their subjective preferences. To reduce the cognitive load on the decision maker, previous work has introduced the Pareto pruning problem, where the goal is to compute a fixed-size subset of Pareto optimal solutions that best represent the full set, as evaluated by a given quality measure. Reframing Pareto pruning as a multiwinner voting problem, we conduct an axiomatic analysis of existing quality measures, uncovering several unintuitive behaviors. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a new measure, directed coverage. We also analyze the computational complexity of optimizing various quality measures, identifying previously unknown boundaries between tractable and intractable cases depending on the number and structure of the objectives. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation, demonstrating that the choice of quality measure has a decisive impact on the characteristics of the selected set of solutions and that our proposed measure performs competitively or even favorably across a range of settings.

Picking a Representative Set of Solutions in Multiobjective Optimization: Axioms, Algorithms, and Experiments

With the daily influx of 3D data on the internet, text-3D retrieval has gained increasing attention. However, current methods face two major challenges: Hierarchy Representation Collapse (HRC) and Redundancy-Induced Saliency Dilution (RISD). HRC compresses abstract-to-specific and whole-to-part hierarchies in Euclidean embeddings, while RISD averages noisy fragments, obscuring critical semantic cues and diminishing the model’s ability to distinguish hard negatives. To address these challenges, we introduce the Hyperbolic Hierarchical Alignment Reasoning Network (H$^{2}$ARN) for text-3D retrieval. H$^{2}$ARN embeds both text and 3D data in a Lorentz-model hyperbolic space, where exponential volume growth inherently preserves hierarchical distances. A hierarchical ordering loss constructs a shrinking entailment cone around each text vector, ensuring that the matched 3D instance falls within the cone, while an instance-level contrastive loss jointly enforces separation from non-matching samples. To tackle RISD, we propose a contribution-aware hyperbolic aggregation module that leverages Lorentzian distance to assess the relevance of each local feature and applies contribution-weighted aggregation guided by hyperbolic geometry, enhancing discriminative regions while suppressing redundancy without additional supervision. We also release the expanded T3DR-HIT v2 benchmark, which contains 8,935 text-to-3D pairs, 2.6 times the original size, covering both fine-grained cultural artefacts and complex indoor scenes. **Our dataset and codes will be available after acceptance.**

Hyperbolic Hierarchical Alignment Reasoning Network for Text-3D Retrieval

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is critical for detecting hallucinations in black-box Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, prevailing methods like Discrete Semantic Entropy (DSE) are unreliable, as their scores are primarily dominated by the number of semantic clusters. This renders them incapable of distinguishing between benign semantic ambiguity (varied but coherent responses) and severe belief conflict (contradictory responses). We address this limitation by proposing a novel, black-box framework rooted in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, built on the premise that not all inconsistency is equal. Our method decomposes uncertainty into two complementary metrics: Belief Divergence, which quantifies ambiguity by measuring the separation between viewpoints, and Belief Conflict, which captures direct logical contradictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework provides a more reliable measure of uncertainty.

Not All Inconsistency Is Equal: Decomposing LVLM Uncertainty into Belief Divergence and Belief Conflict

Multivariate motif discovery aims to identify frequently occurring subsequences within multi-dimensional time series, which is a critical machine learning task with wide applications. However, previous motif discovery algorithms often miss complex multivariate motifs and struggle with high computational costs as data scale and dimensionality grow. We propose a novel \underline{L}earnable \underline{M}ultivari\underline{A}te matrix \underline{P}rofile method (L-MAP) that captures inter-dimensional dependencies for comprehensive analysis of multivariate time series. The time series is partitioned into subsequences using the Fourier transform in the frequency domain, with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) assigning them to buckets based on distinct patterns. Each subsequence is modeled as a graph for multivariate fusion, where triplet learning is used to capture cross-dimensional relationships and form graph embeddings. Unlike prior methods relying on Euclidean distance modeling, our graph-based approach computes all-pairs similarity in a latent space, which constructs the multivariate matrix profile from distributions formed by embedding clusters. Extensive experiments on multivariate datasets from diverse domains demonstrate that L-MAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motif discovery, offering superior quality, diversity, and scalability efficiency.

Learnable Matrix Profile for Motif Discovery on Multivariate Time Series

Multi-task imitation learning (MTIL) has shown significant potential in robotic manipulation by enabling agents to perform various tasks using a single policy. It simplifies the policy deployment and enhances the agent's adaptability across different scenarios. However, key challenges remain, such as maintaining action reliability (e.g., avoiding abnormal action sequences that deviate from nominal task trajectories) and generalizing to unseen tasks with a few expert demonstrations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Foresight-Augmented Manipulation (FoAM) policy, a novel MTIL policy that pioneers the use of multi-modal goal conditions as input and introduces a foresight augmentation in addition to the general action reconstruction. FoAM enables the agent to reason about its actions' visual consequences (foresight) and to be guided by these more expressive representations during task execution. Extensive experiments on over 100 tasks in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that FoAM significantly enhances MTIL policy performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 41% in success rate. Meanwhile, we released our simulation suites, including 10 scenarios and over 80 challenging tasks designed for manipulation policy training and evaluation. Please see the supplementary materials for details.

FoAM: Foresight-Augmented Multi-Task Imitation Policy for Robotic Manipulation

Applying large, proprietary API-based language models to text-to-SQL tasks poses a significant industry challenge: reliance on massive, schema-heavy prompts results in prohibitive per-token API costs and high latency, hindering scalable production deployment. We present a specialized, self-hosted 8B-parameter model designed for a conversational bot in CriQ, a sister app to Dream11—India’s largest fantasy sports platform with over 250 million users—that answers user queries about cricket statistics. Our novel two-phase supervised fine-tuning approach enables the model to internalize the entire database schema, eliminating the need for long-context prompts. This reduces input tokens by over 99%, from a 17k-token baseline to fewer than 100, and replaces costly external API calls with efficient local inference. The resulting system achieves 98.4% execution success and 92.5% semantic accuracy, substantially outperforming a prompt-engineered baseline using Google’s Gemini Flash 2.0 (95.6% execution, 89.4% semantic accuracy). These results demonstrate a practical path toward high-precision, low-latency text-to-SQL applications using domain-specialized, self-hosted language models in large-scale production environments.

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