Singapore

Causal discovery is the task of learning causal models, encoding causal relationships, from a source of information, such as a dataset containing observational data. While many algorithms have been developed to discover causal models under varied sets of assumptions, the case in which the dataset is affected by missing data remains significantly underexplored. Naively applying standard causal discovery algorithms to listwise, test-wise, or regression-wise deleted datasets, or imputing the missing data, can introduce spurious associations between variables and bias function estimation in functional causal models. This issue arises when the data is missing at random or not at random. It ultimately invalidates the theoretical guarantees of these algorithms and prevents finding the true underlying causal model, even in the large-sample limit. An established family of causal models is the Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model (LiNGAM), which assumes linear functional relationships and non-Gaussian independent noise terms. We propose a new causal discovery algorithm for LiNGAM, capable of recovering the underlying causal structure and providing unbiased estimates of the model’s parameters, even when the data is affected by MNAR missingness.

AAAI 2026

Discovering Linear Non-Gaussian Models for All Categories of Missing Data (Student Abstract)

statistical learning

probabilistic reasoning

graphical models

knowledge discovery

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.

poster

Although deep networks excel on RGB images, their performance degrades sharply under severe domain shifts—such as sketch recognition, where color and texture cues are missing. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that leverages semantic cues extracted from sketches to guide the synthesis of photorealistic RGB images using diffusion-based generative models. Our framework operates by extracting two crucial cues from the input sketch: semantic captions via the BLIP model and structural outlines via Canny edge detection. These cues are then integrated using ControlNet to guide a Stable Diffusion model, ensuring the synthesized RGB image is both semantically consistent with the content and structurally faithful to the original sketch. We evaluated our synthesized images by benchmarking classification performance. We trained standard architectures (from convolutional to transformer-based) on Tiny-ImageNet subsets and tested them on sketches, their synthesized counterparts, and the original RGB images. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces realistic, identity-preserving images, which significantly improve classification accuracy and effectively bridge the semantic gap. While BLIP-based captioning and ControlNet-guided diffusion are established methods, our contribution lies in their integration into a unified, caption-guided pipeline that enhances sketch-to-RGB translation with improved semantic consistency. The proposed method generalizes well across architectures, providing a scalable and cost-efficient solution for sketch-based image synthesis.

Semantic-Guided Sketch-to-RGB Image Generation via Controlled Diffusion for Improved Sketch Recognition (Student Abstract)

Government verification systems are increasingly relying on internet-based platforms, where users authenticate their identities by uploading images captured with ordinary mobile devices. However, the rapid advancements in generative algorithms have enabled the creation of highly realistic forged ID cards that can easily bypass such verification pipelines. These forgeries are not restricted to a single modality; they may target facial imagery, textual content, or both, posing significant challenges to existing detection approaches. We present a framework that analyzes visual features for ID forgery detection by integrating feature fusion with attention mechanisms, leveraging both convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, such as ResNet-50 and EfficientNet, and transformer-based models, including ViT-16 and Swin Transformer. This study emphasises the significance of feature fusion and attention-driven representation learning in developing robust and trustworthy ID forgery detection systems for real-world deployment.

Guarding Digital Identity: Attention-Guided Fusion for Detecting Forged ID Documents (Student Abstract)

We study when users end a session on X using high-resolution interaction logs from 215 US participants collected over four weeks. Sessions are defined via data-driven inter-activity gaps, and each session is encoded by fine-grained activity counts and duration (versus a simple activity ratio baseline). Fine-grained activity features substantially outperform the activity ratio baseline (C-index ≈ 0.76 vs. 0.62 for future sessions; 0.72 vs. 0.60 for unseen users), indicating that the composition of activity types is a strong predictor of disengagement. At the app level, we analyze retention over early adoption windows and find that the ratio of active activity in the first three days is most predictive of later usage. These results highlight session composition and early on-platform behavior as practical levers for forecasting and mitigating premature drop-off.

Predicting Session Termination and Retention on X from Fine-Grained Interaction Logs (Student Abstract)

“Refusals must be resilient, not brittle.” Yet guarding
refusals against adversarial phrasing and shifting user
contexts remains difficult: large language models (LLMs)
still yield to jailbreak prompts that evade safety filters
and surface harmful content. Despite gains from methods
like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and
supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these global controls blur
refusal boundaries across domains such as violence, fraud,
and privacy, and frequently collapse under adversarial
variation. We propose Refusal Activation Steering (RAS), a
training-free, inference-time method that uses contrastive
activations to shift LLM responses, biasing generation
trajectories toward refusals without altering model
weights. The approach is modular and domain-targetable,
avoiding collateral refusals on benign queries while
strengthening activation-space boundaries for unsafe
content. On adversarial evaluations with an 8B
instruction-tuned model, we find that steering improves
refusal rate by 52% and reduces attack success rate by 40%,
establishing a lightweight and interpretable safety layer
for robust refusal consistency.

Always Refuse: Steering LLMs Against Jailbreaks with Contrastive Activations (Student Abstract)

Deep learning has advanced medical imaging, but limited
interpretability hinders clinical adoption. Class
activation maps (CAMs) provide visual explanations, yet
methods such as Score-CAM are computationally expensive,
requiring a forward pass for each activation map and
limiting real-time applicability despite their high
fidelity. To overcome this limitation, LowRank-CAM is
proposed, which aggregates activation maps into a global
matrix and applies singular value decomposition (SVD) to
extract dominant spatial modes. The resulting top-r
attention masks, with r much smaller than K, replace
per-channel perturbations and require only r forward passes
through the classifier head. This low-rank formulation
substantially reduces complexity while preserving
class-discriminatory importance. Experiments on
musculoskeletal radiographs with Inception-v3 demonstrate
that LowRank-CAM achieves a 4.73× speedup over Score-CAM
while maintaining comparable visual clarity and diagnostic
relevance.

LowRank-CAM: A Computationally Efficient and Interpretable Framework for Medical Image Analysis (Student Abstract)

Quantum machine learning (QML) has attracted growing
interest for their ability to achieve superior performance
with significantly fewer parameters.
However, the high cost and scarcity of current hardware
push inference to cloud-hosted quantum devices, creating a
tension between verifiability and confidentiality.
This work proposes a novel framework that converts quantum
neural network operations into classical arithmetic
circuits that faithfully approximate genuine quantum
computations. By encrypting these circuits with
zero-knowledge proofs, it ensures computational validity
while concealing internal parameters. Experimental results
show that our classical circuits achieve fidelity above
0.9996 and total variation distance below 1% compared to
actual quantum computations, verifying the practicality of
trustworthy and privacy-preserving quantum inference.

zkQML: Verifiable and Privacy-Preserving Inference for Quantum Machine Learning (Student Abstract)

We present Graph Neural ODEs (GNODEs) for modeling tumor
microenvironment dynamics with mathematically guaranteed
stability and conservation properties. Unlike bulk ODEs
that miss spatial heterogeneity or discrete GNNs that
inadequately capture continuous biological processes,
GNODEs provide continuous-time evolution with explicit
adjacency-aware dynamics while maintaining provable
trajectory bounds. Our framework ensures: (1) existence and
uniqueness of solutions under dynamic graph topology, (2)
Lyapunov stability preventing unphysical states like
negative cell counts, and (3) exact conservation of
biological invariants through architectural constraints.
Benchmarking on synthetic tumor data demonstrates that
GNODE accurately captures resistant cell fraction dynamics
(0.282 predicted vs 0.242 true) while graph-free
alternatives fail completely (0.000), proving that
stability-constrained local interactions are essential for
modeling emergent resistance.

Graph Neural ODEs with Stability and Conservation Guarantees for Tumor Microenvironment Dynamics (Student Abstract)

Large language models (LLMs) often generate
hallucinations—fluent yet factually incorrect
responses—that undermine reliability in knowledge-intensive
tasks.
Existing approaches for hallucination mitigation typically
rely on external retrieval modules or probability
heuristics, which either require additional resources or
lack interpretability. In this work, we propose a
diffusion-based hallucination detection framework (DHDF)
that leverages U-Net denoising to reconstruct consensus
answers from multiple LLM outputs. If the diffusion process
exhibits spurious convergence away from factual ground
truth, it provides a clear signal of hallucination. To
quantify factual correctness, we incorporate TruthfulQA
scores as a fact-grounded evaluation metric, distinguishing
well-aligned models (high scores) from hallucination-prone
models (low scores). Experimental results demonstrate that
convergence dynamics under diffusion, combined with
fact-grounded QA evaluation, offer an effective and
interpretable pathway for hallucination detection without
relying on external knowledge bases.

Diffusion for Combating the Hallucination in Large Language Models (Student Abstract)

Extending LLM context windows is crucial for long range tasks. RoPE-based position interpolation (PI) methods like linear and frequency-aware scaling extend input lengths without retraining, while post-training quantization (PTQ) enables practical deployment. We show that combining PI with PTQ degrades accuracy due to coupled effects long context aliasing, dynamic range dilation, axis grid anisotropy, and outlier shifting that induce position-dependent logit noise. We provide the first systematic analysis of PI plus PTQ and introduce two diagnostics: Interpolation Pressure (per-band phase scaling sensitivity) and Tail Inflation Ratios (outlier shift from short to long contexts). To address this, we propose Q-ROAR, a RoPE-aware, weight-only stabilization that groups RoPE dimensions into a few frequency bands and performs a small search over per-band scales for W_Q, W_K, with an optional symmetric variant to preserve logit scale. The diagnostics guided search uses a tiny long-context dev set and requires no fine-tuning, kernel, or architecture changes. Empirically, Q-ROAR recovers up to 0.7% accuracy on standard tasks and reduces GovReport perplexity by more than 14%, while preserving short-context performance and compatibility with existing inference stacks.

Q-ROAR: Outlier-Aware Rescaling for RoPE Position Interpolation in Quantized Long-Context LLMs (Student Abstract)

Catastrophic forgetting remains a central challenge in
lifelong learning, where newly acquired knowledge
interferes with previously learned tasks, degrading
performance over time. Mitigation strategies such as
rehearsal and regularization have been proposed, but both
introduce limitations, either by retaining old data or by
constraining model updates in ways that may impair
learning. Complicating matters, recent findings show that
feature-space overlap between tasks can produce similar
performance drops even in models that memorize data, making
it difficult to distinguish true forgetting from
representational interference. Current accuracy-based
metrics fail to disentangle these effects, undermining
diagnostic clarity.
In this paper, we introduce the Overlap Index, an
incremental cluster validity index adapted from the
inter-cluster component of the iCONN index, which
quantifies overlap between feature representations in input
or latent space. We then introduce the Overshadowing and
Forgetting Index, an online meta-metric that leverages the
Overlap Index to attribute performance degradation to
catastrophic forgetting, class overshadowing, or both. Our
experimental results demonstrate that these tools enable
more precise online and batch-mode evaluation of continual
learning systems, paving the way for more targeted
mitigation strategies.

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