Singapore

Theory of mind refers to the attribution of mental states
that humans ascribe to other humans or objects (such as
computer-based systems). Recently, the attribution of
mental states has been investigated toward Artificial
Intelligence (AI) as a basic manner to capture people&#39;s
engagement toward it, and people&#39;s perception about AI
social skills and AI capabilities.
In line with this idea, mental state attribution can be
used as an indirect measure of students&#39; understanding of
AI functioning, and in particular of the kind of
interactions students may have with AI systems. Too often
is the case of people using generative AI systems in ways
that exceed their actual ways of functioning. In our study,
children of age in the range 9-12 were involved in one-shot
unplugged activities concerning data and models.
The unplugged activities were not aimed at teaching the
theory of Machine Learning but rather they were designed so
as to provide awareness on some basic mechanisms and help
developing a correct use of tools that are becoming more
and more present in everyday life. This paper introduces
the activities and reports
the results that were achieved.

AAAI 2026

Unplugged Activities on Machine Learning and Their Evaluation Through Mental States Attribution

theoy of mind

evaluation of educational activities

machine learning education

unplugged computer science

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.

Theory of mind refers to the attribution of mental states
that humans ascribe to other humans or objects (such as
computer-based systems). Recently, the attribution of
mental states has been investigated toward Artificial
Intelligence (AI) as a basic manner to capture people's
engagement toward it, and people's perception about AI
social skills and AI capabilities.
In line with this idea, mental state attribution can be
used as an indirect measure of students' understanding of
AI functioning, and in particular of the kind of
interactions students may have with AI systems. Too often
is the case of people using generative AI systems in ways
that exceed their actual ways of functioning. In our study,
children of age in the range 9-12 were involved in one-shot
unplugged activities concerning data and models.
The unplugged activities were not aimed at teaching the
theory of Machine Learning but rather they were designed so
as to provide awareness on some basic mechanisms and help
developing a correct use of tools that are becoming more
and more present in everyday life. This paper introduces
the activities and reports
the results that were achieved.

technical paper

Auditing large language models (LLMs) for biases is an ongoing and dynamic process, resembling a proverbial cat-and-mouse game. As researchers identify new vulnerabilities in LLMs, guardrails are updated to address them, prompting the need for innovative approaches to audit the increasingly fortified LLMs for biases. 
This paper makes three contributions. First, it introduces a scalable, explainable framework to measure biases against various identity groups across multiple open large language models. Second, it conducts a bias audit considering five well-known open LLMs and demonstrates their bias inclinations towards several historically disadvantaged groups. Our audit reveals disturbing antisemitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic biases present in several well-known LLMs. Finally, we release a dataset of 1,000 probes curated under the supervision of an expert social scientist that can facilitate similar audits.

How Can You Tell if Your Large Language Model Could Be a Closet Antisemite? An Explainability-Based Audit Framework for Implicit Bias

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly
integrated into daily life, higher education must move
beyond code-centric instruction to foster holistic AI
literacy. We present a novel pedagogical approach that
integrates embodied, unplugged activities into a
university-level Introduction to AI course. Inspired by the
effectiveness of CS Unplugged in K-12 education, our
physical, collaborative activities gave students a
first-person perspective on AI decision-making. Through
interactive games modeling Search Algorithms, Markov
Decision Processes, Q-learning, and Hidden Markov Models,
students built an intuition for complex AI concepts and
more easily transitioned to mathematical formalizations and
code implementations. We present four unplugged AI
activities, describe how to bridge from unplugged
activities to plugged coding tasks, reflect on
implementation challenges, and propose refinements. We
suggest that unplugged activities can effectively bridge
conceptual reasoning and technical skill-building in
university-level AI education.

AI Unplugged: Embodied Interactions for AI Literacy in Higher Education

Embedding deep neural networks (NNs) into mixed-integer programs (MIPs) is attractive for decision making with learned constraints, yet state-of-the-art “monolithic’’ linearisations blow up in size and quickly become intractable. In this paper, we introduce a novel dual-decomposition framework that relaxes the single coupling equality $u=x$ with an augmented Lagrange multiplier and splits the problem into a vanilla MIP and a constrained NN block. Each part is tackled by the solver that suits it best—branch \& cut for the MIP subproblem, first-order optimisation for the NN subproblem—so the model remains modular, the number of integer variables never grows with network depth, and the per-iteration cost scales only linearly with the NN size. On the public \textsc{SurrogateLIB} benchmark, our method proves scalable, modular, and adaptable: it runs 120$\times$ faster than an exact Big–M formulation on the largest test case; the NN sub-solver can be swapped from a log-barrier interior step to a projected-gradient routine with no code changes and identical objective value; and swapping the MLP for an LSTM backbone still completes the full optimisation in 47s without any bespoke adaptation.

Scalable Mixed-Integer Optimization with Neural Constraints via Dual Decomposition

Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to achieve precise object detection and tracking through natural language instructions, representing a fundamental capability for intelligent robotic systems. However, current RMOT research remains mostly confined to ground-level scenarios, which constrains their ability to capture broad-scale scene contexts and perform comprehensive tracking and path planning. In contrast, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) leverage their expansive aerial perspectives and superior maneuverability to enable wide-area surveillance. Moreover, UAVs have emerged as critical platforms for Embodied Intelligence, which has given rise to an unprecedented demand for intelligent aerial systems capable of natural language interaction. 
To this end, we introduce AerialMind, the first large-scale RMOT benchmark in UAV scenarios, which aims to bridge this research gap. To facilitate its construction, we develop an innovative semi-automated collaborative agent-based labeling assistant (COALA) framework that significantly reduces labor costs while maintaining annotation quality. Furthermore, we propose HawkEyeTrack (HETrack), a novel method that collaboratively enhances vision-language representation learning and improves the perception of UAV scenarios. Comprehensive experiments validated the challenging nature of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method. More details about the dataset, development kits, and code can be found in the supplementary materials.

AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios

Segment Anything Model (SAM) struggles in open-world scenarios with diverse domains. In such settings, naive fine-tuning with a well-designed learning module is inadequate and often causes *catastrophic forgetting* issue when learning incrementally. To address this issue, we propose a novel continual learning (CL) method for SAM, termed **SAMCL**. Rather than relying on a fixed learning module, our method decomposes incremental knowledge into separate modules and trains a selector to choose the appropriate one during inference. However, this intuitive design introduces two key challenges: ensuring effective module learning and selection, and managing storage as tasks accumulate. To tackle these, we introduce two components: *AugModule* and *Module Selector*. *AugModule* reduces the storage of the popular LoRA learning module by sharing parameters across layers while maintaining accuracy. It also employs heatmaps—generated from point prompts—to further enhance domain adaptation with minimal additional cost. *Module Selector* leverages the observation that SAM’s embeddings can effectively distinguish domains, enabling high selection accuracy by training on low-consumed embeddings instead of raw images. Experiments show that **SAMCL** outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving only $0.19\%$ forgetting and at least $2.5\%$ gain on unseen domains. Each *AugModule* requires just $0.233$ MB, reducing storage by at least $24.3\%$ over other fine-tuning approaches. The buffer storage for *Module Selector* is further reduced by up to $256\times$.

SAMCL: Empowering SAM to Continually Learn from Dynamic Domains with Extreme Storage Efficiency

Hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) have shown great potential in modeling higher-order relationships among multiple entities. However, most existing HGNNs primarily emphasize low-pass filtering while neglecting the role of high-frequency information. In this work, we present a theoretical investigation into the spectral behavior of HGNNs and prove that combining both low-pass and high-pass components leads to more expressive and effective models. Notably, our analysis highlights that high-pass signals play a crucial role in capturing local discriminative structures within hypergraphs. Guided by these insights, we propose a novel sheaflet-based HNNs that integrates cellular sheaf theory and framelet transforms to preserve higher-order dependencies while enabling multi-scale spectral decomposition. This framework explicitly emphasizes high-pass components, aligning with our theoretical findings. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, validating the importance of high-frequency information in hypergraph learning.

High-Pass Matters: Theoretical Insights and Sheaflet-Based Design for Hypergraph Neural Networks

Task scheduling has become increasingly critical for embodied AI, where agents need to follow natural language instructions and execute actions efficiently in 3D physical worlds. Existing datasets for task planning in 3D environments often simplify the problem, lacking operations research knowledge for task scheduling and 3D grounding for real-world applications. In this work, we propose Operations Research Knowledge-based 3D Grounded Task Scheduling (OKS3D), a new task that requires synerization of language understanding, 3D grounding, and efficiency optimization for embodied agents. OKS3D reflects real-world demands by requiring agents to generate efficient, step-by-step schedules that are grounded in 3D space. To facilitate research on OKS3D, we construct a large-scale dataset called OKS3D-60K, comprising 60K tasks across 4K real-world scenes. Furthermore, we propose GRANT, an embodied multi-modal large language model equipped with a simple yet effective scheduling token mechanism to generate efficient task schedules and grounded actions. Extensive experiments on the OKS3D-60K dataset validate the effectiveness of GRANT across language understanding, 3D grounding, and scheduling efficiency. The code and dataset will be released.

Cook and Clean Together: Teaching Embodied Agents for Parallel Task Execution

Self-evaluation, a model's ability to assess the correctness of its own output, is crucial for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to achieve self-improvement in multi-turn conversations, yet largely absent in foundation models. Recent work has employed reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance self-evaluation; however, its fixed reward mechanism suffers from reward hacking when optimizing multiple training objectives, leading to model collapse. In this paper we propose AdaPO, an online reinforcement learning framework capable of adaptively adjusting training objective in real time according to the current training state for each task. Specifically, to mitigate reward hacking , AdaPO introduces an Adaptive Reward Model (ARM) and a Reward Aware Dynamic KL Regularization mechanism. ARM assesses the task's training state from the distribution of model generated multi-turn trajectories' performance. Reward Aware Dynamic KL replaces a fixed penalty with dynamic coefficients which is modulated by the reward gap between different multi-turn situations. 
Notably, our method automatically and smoothly adjusts its learning focus based on sub-tasks' training progress without manual intervention.
Extensive experiments over 8 benchmarks and various models show that our method significantly enhances both direct reasoning and self-evaluation capability. We will release our code to contribute to the community.

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss: Adaptive Policy Optimization for Stable Self-Evaluation in Large Multimodal Models

ArguBot Arena: Prompt Engineering a Debate on Responsible AI

We stand at the dawn of the AI era, a technological revolution poised to be the most consequential of our generation, presenting both unprecedented opportunities and profound challenges. But this promise is shadowed by significant challenges. To build a future we want, we must move beyond the hype and the headlines to confront the most pressing open problems—technical, sociotechnical, and multidisciplinary. This talk will review the rapid progress, dissect challenges ahead, and argue that our greatest task isn’t simply building smarter machines, but fostering the human wisdom to guide them towards a future that is not only intelligent but also equitable, safe, and profoundly human.

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Next from AAAI 2026

How Can You Tell if Your Large Language Model Could Be a Closet Antisemite? An Explainability-Based Audit Framework for Implicit Bias

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