Singapore

Explainable AI (XAI) as a field has traditionally focused
and succeeded at providing explanations for single-shot
decision-making systems like classifiers.
However, there is a growing consensus that some of the most
challenging problems within explainable AI lie not within
single-shot decision-making settings, but rather in
sequential decision-making ones. Moreover, by switching to
a sequential decision-making setting, we also see novel
opportunities to build explainable agents that are actually
able to reason about when and how to provide explanations
to maximize their effectiveness. As of right now, most of
the work within explainable sequential decision-making
tends to happen in isolation within subcommunities like
planning, reinforcement learning, and robotics. While this
has led to the development of useful explanation methods,
the fragmentation has also made it harder to adopt and
transfer advances and insights from one subcommunity to
another. Addressing this requires us to take a more
holistic view of explainable sequential decision-making,
one that allows us to account for and understand the
contributions from every subfield in a single unified
framework. In this talk, we will talk about the efforts
that have been made towards this end and some of the most
important challenges that remain.

AAAI 2026

Explanations for Sequential Decision-Making – an Overview

xai sequential decision making rl planning robotics

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables image search by combining a reference image with modification text, providing a flexible interface to adapt to personalized visual preferences. Unfortunately, intrinsic noise in CIR triplets incurs training uncertainty and threatens model's robustness. Despite the probabilistic learning approaches in multi-modal retrieval, they still fall short for CIR due to their instance-level holistic modeling and homogeneous treatments for queries and targets. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided (HUG) paradigm to overcome these limitations. HUG utilizes a fine-grained probabilistic learning framework, where queries and targets are represented by Gaussian embeddings capturing detailed concepts and uncertainties. We customize heterogeneous uncertainty estimations for multi-modal queries and uni-modal targets. In particular, given a query, we capture uncertainties not only regarding uni-modal content quality but also multi-modal coordination, followed by a provable dynamic weighting mechanism to derive the comprehensive query uncertainty. We further design uncertainty-guided objectives, including query-target holistic contrast and fine-grained contrasts with comprehensive negative sampling strategies, which effectively enhance discriminative learning. Experiments on benchmarks demonstrate HUG's effectiveness beyond state-of-the-art baselines, with faithful analysis justifying each of the technical contributions. More encouragingly, the learned representations show intuitive correlation to some image and text attributes, with the uncertainty magnitudes reflecting ambiguity degrees, providing interpretability insights. We will release the code, detailed instructions and training files.

Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided Composed Image Retrieval with Fine-Grained Probabilistic Learning

Rationalization model has recently garnered significant attention for enhancing the interpretability of natural language processing by first using a generator to select the most relevant pieces from the text with respect to the label, before passing the text input to the predictor.
However, the robustness of the rationalization models is not sufficiently investigated. Specifically, this paper explores the robustness of rationalization models against backdoor attacks, which has been ignored by previous studies. Surprisingly, we find that conventional backdoor attack techniques fail to inject triggers into the rationalization model because its generator can filter out bad triggers. Considering this, we further propose a novel backdoor attack method named as BadRNL designed specially for the rationalization models. The core idea of BadRNL is first to search for the personalized trigger for each specific dataset and then manipulate the rationales and labels to conduct attacks. Besides, BadRNL controls the order of sample learning through poison-priority sampling strategies. Experimental results show that our method can successfully craft the predictions of samples containing triggers while maintaining the performance of the model on clean data.

Backdooring Rationalization

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to uncover the latent structure of multi-view data by learning view-common and view-specific information.
Although recent studies have explored hyperbolic representations for better tackling the representation gap between different views, they focus primarily on instance-level alignment and neglect global semantic consistency, rendering them vulnerable to view-specific information (e.g., noise and cross-view discrepancies).
To this end, this paper proposes a novel Wasserstein-Aligned Hyperbolic (WAH) framework for multi-view clustering. Specifically, our method exploits a view-specific hyperbolic encoder for each view to embed features into the Lorentz manifold for hierarchical semantic modeling. Whereafter, a global semantic loss based on the hyperbolic sliced-Wasserstein distance is introduced to align manifold distributions across views. This is followed by soft cluster assignments to encourage cross-view semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarking datasets show that our method can achieve SOTA clustering performance.

Wasserstein-Aligned Hyperbolic Multi-View Clustering

Forecasting 3D human motion is an important embodiment of fine-grained understanding and cognition of human behavior by artificial agents. Current approaches excessively rely on implicit network modeling of spatiotemporal relationships and motion characteristics, falling into the passive learning trap that results in redundant and monotonous 3D coordinate information acquisition while lacking actively guided explicit learning mechanisms. To overcome these issues, we propose an Active Perceptual Strategy (APS) for human motion prediction, leveraging quotient space representations to explicitly encode motion properties while introducing auxiliary learning objectives to strengthen spatio-temporal modeling. Specifically, we first design a data perception module that projects poses into the quotient space, decoupling motion geometry from coordinate redundancy. By jointly encoding tangent vectors and Grassmann projections, this module simultaneously achieves geometric dimension reduction, semantic decoupling, and dynamic constraint enforcement for effective motion pose characterization. Furthermore, we introduce a network perception module that actively learns spatio-temporal dependencies through restorative learning. This module deliberately masks specific joints or injects noise to construct auxiliary supervision signals. A dedicated auxiliary learning network is designed to actively adapt and learn from perturbed information. Notably, APS is model agnostic and can be integrated with different prediction models to enhance active perceptual.The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods by large margins: 16.3% on H3.6M, 13.9% on CMU Mocap, and 10.1% on 3DPW.

Breaking the Passive Learning Trap: An Active Perception Strategy for Human Motion Prediction

Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience, make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team decision-support tool designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to facilitate further research in this field.

RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of human-robot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain (OOD) generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization. To the best of our knowledge, Affordance-R1 is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with reasoning into affordance reasoning. The code of our method and our dataset will be publicly released soon.

Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multiplex graphs are widely used to model multi-relational complex systems and play an important role in various real-world scenarios, such as financial systems and social networks. Hence, detecting anomalous samples in multiplex graph becomes crucial to ensure cybersecurity and stability. Although existing homogeneous graph anomaly detection (GAD) methods can be applied to deal with multiplex graphs, they still face two major challenges: 1) Due to the multiplicity and complexity of relations in multiplex graphs, homogeneous GAD models fail to effectively capture anomalous behaviors that correlate with diverse relational patterns. 2) In real-world applications, malicious entities usually disguise themselves through various camouflage strategies, making it difficult to capture subtle anomalous features via single-relation analysis. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method for multiplex graphs based on Similarity-constrained Fusion Graph Autoencoder (SFGA). In SFGA, we design a multiplex graph autoencoder and introduced a cross-plex attention module at the model bottleneck to achieve comprehensive modeling of cross-relation anomaly patterns. Then, a similarity balancing strategy is proposed to constrain node representations at the bottleneck from both local and global perspectives, enhancing the discriminative power against camouflaged anomalies of autoencoder and enabling more effective identification of anomalous nodes with overlapping or deceptive patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets at varying scales, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.

SFGA: Similarity-Constrained Fusion Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Multiplex Graphs

Linear models are widely used in high-stakes decision-making due to their simplicity and interpretability. Yet when fairness constraints such as demographic parity are introduced, their effects on model coefficients, and thus on how predictive bias is distributed across features, remain opaque. Existing approaches on linear models often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions, or overlook the explicit role of the sensitive attribute, limiting their practical utility for fairness assessment.
We extend the work of Chzhen and Schreuder (2022) and Fukuchi and Sakuma (2023) by proposing a post-processing framework that can be applied on top of any linear model to decompose the resulting bias into direct (sensitive-attribute) and indirect (correlated-features) components. Our method analytically characterizes how demographic parity reshapes each model coefficient, including those of both sensitive and non-sensitive features. This enables a transparent, feature-level interpretation of fairness interventions and reveals how bias may persist or shift through correlated variables.
Our framework requires no model retraining and provides actionable insights for model auditing and mitigation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method captures fairness dynamics missed by prior work, offering a practical and interpretable tool for responsible deployment of linear models.

Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models Under Demographic Parity Constraint

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval---the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm---should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5-18 F₁), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 pp and cuts misleading-context overrides by -29.3 pp, while adding only 0.3 % parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

Seeing through the Conﬂict: Transparent Knowledge Conﬂict Handling in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Leveraging social homophily to enhance user preference modeling, social recommendation has become a cornerstone of modern recommender systems. However, the raw social network contains inherent unreliability as it teems with noise---misclicks, bot-generated and transient ties---while many meaningful links remain unobserved. In this study, we propose DRSoRec, a dual-rectification model to rectify the raw social networks by simultaneously removing noisy signals and preserving useful information. Specifically, the invariant social rationale discovery module distills each user's influential core social circle of the current recommendation, whereas the adaptive social connection refinement module employs a mixture-of-experts structure learner to prune spurious edges and uncover latent links. A contrastive optimization objective is designed to align and mutually enhance these two modules, and the refined user representations are fused with collaborative representations generated from interactions for the final recommendation. Experiments on three public datasets confirm that DRSoRec consistently gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

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