Singapore

Adolescents struggle to understand bias and representation
in AI, particularly the concept of how datasets used in
machine learning can be representative of populations or
not. Within early experiments in teaching about
investigating bias in AI systems using the Developing AI
Literacy (DAILy) curriculum, we observed participating
youth struggling to understand what it meant to be
represented in the output of AI tools. For example, when
using Google Image Search with prompts such as “physicist”
and “outdoor recreation,” participating youth did not
understand the question, “Are you represented in this
outcome?” We saw an opportunity to address this challenge
using the Kapor Foundation&#39;s Responsible AI and Tech
Justice Guide. Drawing insights from three of the six core
components of the framework presented in the guide, we
developed Games of Representation (GR), a series of three
card-based activities using SET game cards to teach
concepts of population, sample, dataset, and
representation. Through game play, players manipulate
datasets, role-play as stakeholders with competing
interests, and explore real-world scenarios where
representation matters. The GR games and corresponding
guide provide educators, families, and care providers with
flexible, hands-on activities for guided, playful
conversations with adolescents about AI ethics. This work
contributes practical resources for K-12 AI education while
addressing critical gaps in youth understanding of
statistical bias and stakeholder influence in AI
development.

AAAI 2026

Games of Representation: Developing Card-Based Activities to Teach About Representation and Bias in AI Datasets

representation

education

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.

Adolescents struggle to understand bias and representation
in AI, particularly the concept of how datasets used in
machine learning can be representative of populations or
not. Within early experiments in teaching about
investigating bias in AI systems using the Developing AI
Literacy (DAILy) curriculum, we observed participating
youth struggling to understand what it meant to be
represented in the output of AI tools. For example, when
using Google Image Search with prompts such as “physicist”
and “outdoor recreation,” participating youth did not
understand the question, “Are you represented in this
outcome?” We saw an opportunity to address this challenge
using the Kapor Foundation's Responsible AI and Tech
Justice Guide. Drawing insights from three of the six core
components of the framework presented in the guide, we
developed Games of Representation (GR), a series of three
card-based activities using SET game cards to teach
concepts of population, sample, dataset, and
representation. Through game play, players manipulate
datasets, role-play as stakeholders with competing
interests, and explore real-world scenarios where
representation matters. The GR games and corresponding
guide provide educators, families, and care providers with
flexible, hands-on activities for guided, playful
conversations with adolescents about AI ethics. This work
contributes practical resources for K-12 AI education while
addressing critical gaps in youth understanding of
statistical bias and stakeholder influence in AI
development.

technical paper

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at modeling graph data but often amplify biases tied to sensitive attributes like gender and race. Existing causality-based methods use isolated interventions on graph topology or features, yet struggle to produce representations that balance predictive power with fairness. This leads to two issues: (1) weak predictive power, where representations miss critical task-relevant features, and (2) bias amplification, where representations encode sensitive attributes, causing unfair outcomes. 
To address these issues, we introduce the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS), where necessity ensures representations capture only essential features for predictions, and sufficiency guarantees these features are adequate without relying on sensitive attributes. We propose FairSNR, a fairness-aware graph representation learning framework that introduces constraints based on the PNS. 
Specifically, FairSNR leverages PNS to guide the learning of fair representations from graph data. In particular, FairSNR employs an encoder to learn node representations with high PNS for downstream tasks. To compute and optimize PNS, FairSNR introduces an intervenor that learns to generate the most challenging counterfactual interventions on the representations, thereby enhancing the model’s causal stability even under worst-case scenarios. Finally, a discriminator is trained to detect and mitigate sensitive information leakage in the learned representations, effectively disentangling sensitive biases from task-relevant features. Experiments on real-world graph datasets demonstrate that FairSNR outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both fairness and utility.

Learning Fair Graph Representations via Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency

Video-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multi-modal reasoning capabilities across diverse computer vision applications. However, these VLMs are task-specific and assume that both video and language inputs are complete. However, real-world VLM applications might face challenges due to deactivated sensors (e.g., cameras are unavailable due to data privacy), yielding modality-incomplete data and leading to inconsistency between training and testing data. While straightforward incomplete input can boast training generalization-ability and lead to training failure, its potential risks to VLMs in terms of safety and trustworthiness have been largely neglected. To this end, we make the first attempt to propose a unified incomplete video-language model to process the incomplete multi-modal inputs. Specifically, given incomplete video-text pairs, we first design a multi-modal feature approximation module to construct relational multi-modal graphs based on available cross-modal high semantic similarity features, which can approximate more reliable completion features for the missing modalities. Then, we propose a multi-modal knowledge distillation module to reduce over-reliance on the complete modality. Finally, we propose a multi-granularity multi-modal integration module to integrate semantics-similar video-text pairs by mapping them more compact in the common feature space. Extensive experimental results on several incomplete dataset demonstrate that our method can serve as a plug-and-play module for previous works to improve their performance in various multi-modal tasks.

Towards Unified Vision-Language Models with Incomplete Multi-Modal Inputs

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (S4) has advanced remote sensing (RS) analysis by leveraging unlabeled data through pseudo-labeling and consistency learning. However, existing S4 studies often rely on small-scale datasets and models, limiting their practical applicability. To address this, we propose S5, the first scalable framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in RS, which unlocks the potential of vast unlabeled Earth observation data typically underutilized due to costly pixel-level annotations. Built upon existing large-scale RS datasets, S5 introduces a data selection strategy that integrates entropy-based filtering and diversity expansion, resulting in the RS4P-1M dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically scales S4 methods by pre-training RS foundation models (RSFMs) of varying sizes on this extensive corpus, significantly boosting their performance on land cover segmentation and object detection tasks. Furthermore, during fine-tuning, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based multi-dataset fine-tuning approach, which enables efficient adaptation to multiple RS benchmarks with fewer parameters. This approach improves the generalization and versatility of RSFMs across diverse RS benchmarks. The resulting RSFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks, underscoring the viability of scaling semi-supervised learning for RS applications. All datasets, code, and models will be released to facilitate further research.

S5: Scalable Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing

Self-play fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) without additional human annotations. However, existing methods struggle with complex generation tasks requiring long context understanding, where models produce partially correct outputs interleaved with errors. Traditional approaches train on entire sequences uniformly, failing to distinguish between well-predicted and erroneous regions, leading to diluted learning signals and slow convergence. We propose DRIFT (Difference-aware Reinforcement through Iterative Fine-Tuning), a novel self-play framework that selectively trains on prediction differences. DRIFT introduces two key innovations: (1) Difference-Aware Masking (DAM) that identifies and masks common subsequences between model outputs and ground truth, focusing training exclusively on error regions; (2) Occurrence-Aware Loss (OAL) that provides position-invariant vocabulary supervision, complementing the position-sensitive adversarial loss. This dual mechanism enables models to correct both positional and lexical errors effectively. Theoretically, we prove that DRIFT converges when masked distributions align. Empirically, we evaluate DRIFT on diverse summarization benchmarks using Qwen2.5-3B and LLaMA-3.1-8B models. Results show that DRIFT significantly outperforms both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and self-play fine-tuning (SPIN), achieving up to 16\% improvement on SAMSum dialogue summarization tasks while maintaining general capabilities. Notably, DRIFT breaks the performance ceiling of continued SFT and demonstrates superior efficiency compared to holistic self-play methods, validating that targeted optimization on prediction differences is crucial for structured text generation tasks.

DRIFT: Difference-Aware Reinforcement Through Iterative Fine-Tuning for Language Model

Establishing convergent semantics for weighted argumentation graph is a fundamental and long-standing issue. Particularly, it is challenging to develop convergent semantics for weighted bipolar argumentation graph (wBAG), which include both support and attack relations on weighted arguments. Existing semantics in the literature are not general enough in the sense that they only apply to acyclic graphs or special cyclic cases. In this paper, we provide a general and elegant solution to this issue by adopting the so-called bilateral gradual semantics, so that the strength of arguments can be defined as the limits of iterative functions that always converge for any wBAG including cyclic ones. A preliminary experimental analysis shows that our semantics appear quite efficient in calculating argument strength. Overall, this paper offers a solid and promising foundation for weighted bipolar argumentation in theoretical and practical aspects.

Convergent Semantics for Weighted Bipolar Argumentation

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis, lesion quantification, and preoperative planning. However, conventional Mamba-based architectures, which rely on fixed-directional sequence modeling and flattening of images into one-dimensional sequences, fail to effectively capture hierarchical anatomical features and spatial dependencies, limiting their representation capacity for complex medical structures. To address these challenges, we propose EccoMamba (Enhanced Cross-hierarchical Continuity Orthogonal Mamba), a U-shaped encoder-decoder framework tailored for medical image segmentation. In the encoder’s downsampling path, we introduce the hierarchical aggregation enhancement (HAE) module, which integrates multi-scale convolutions with hierarchical attention. The attention branch further incorporates cross-channel interactions, enabling the model to amplify semantically relevant features and suppress background noise selectively. For skip connections, we design the structural continuity orthogonal (SCO) module to maintain spatial continuity by modeling cross-dimensional dependencies via orthogonal axial shifts, mitigating directional bias and enhancing anatomical consistency. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, ISIC 2018, ISIC 2017, Synapse, and ACDC, demonstrate that EccoMamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both segmentation accuracy and structural fidelity. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EccoMamba-4117/.

EccoMamba: Enhanced Cross-hierarchical Continuity Orthogonal Mamba for Medical Image Segmentation

Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. 
To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. 
Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks (recent progress has pushed the frontier further, with RepoMaster+Claude 3.5 achieving a new record of 62.96%). Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness.
By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment---moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks. The code & datasets are public in https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/GitTaskBench. See the extended version at https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18993.

GitTaskBench: A Benchmark for Code Agents Solving Real-World Tasks Through Code Repository Leveraging

The core problem in multi-view anomaly detection is to represent local neighborhoods of normal instances consistently across all views. Recent approaches consider a representation of local neighborhood in each view independently, and then capture the consistent neighbors across all views via a learning process. They suffer from two key issues. First, there is no guarantee that they can capture consistent neighbors well, especially when the same neighbors are in regions of varied densities in different views, resulting in inferior detection accuracy. Second, the learning process has a high computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$, rendering them inapplicable for large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed \textbf{S}pherical \textbf{C}onsistent \textbf{N}eighborhoods \textbf{E}nsemble (SCoNE). It has two unique features: (a) the consistent neighborhoods are represented with multi-view instances directly, requiring no intermediate representations as used in existing approaches; and (b) the neighborhoods have data-dependent properties, which lead to large neighborhoods in sparse regions and small neighborhoods in dense regions. The data-dependent properties enable local neighborhoods in different views to be represented well as consistent neighborhoods, without learning. This leads to $\mathcal{O}(N)$ time complexity. Empirical evaluations show that SCoNE has superior detection accuracy and runs orders-of-magnitude faster in large datasets than existing approaches.

SCoNE: Spherical Consistent Neighborhoods Ensemble for Effective and Efficient Multi-View Anomaly Detection

We study strategic candidate nomination by parties in elections decided by Plurality voting. Each party selects a nominee before the election, and the winner is chosen from the nominated candidates based on the voters' preferences. We introduce a new restriction on these preferences, which we call party-aligned single-peakedness: all voters agree on a common ordering of the parties along an ideological axis, but may differ in their perceptions of the positions of individual candidates within each party. The preferences of each voter are single-peaked with respect to their own axis over the candidates, which is consistent with the global ordering of the parties.
We present a polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing whether a preference profile satisfies party-aligned single-peakedness. 
In this domain, we give polynomial-time algorithms for deciding whether a given party can become the winner under some (or all) nominations, and whether this can occur in some pure Nash equilibrium. Moreover, we prove a tight result about the guaranteed existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria for elections with up to three parties for single-peaked and party-aligned single-peaked preference profiles.

Computing Equilibrium Nominations in Presidential Elections

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables online model adaptation using only unlabeled test data, aiming to bridge the gap between source and target distributions. However, in multimodal scenarios, varying degrees of distribution shift across different modalities give rise to a complex coupling effect of unimodal shallow feature shift and cross-modal high-level semantic misalignment, posing a major obstacle to extending existing TTA methods to the multimodal field. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multimodal test-time adaptation (MMTTA) framework, termed as Bridging Modalities via Progressive Re-alignment (BriMPR). BriMPR, consisting of two progressively enhanced modules, tackles the coupling effect with a divide-and-conquer strategy. Specifically, we first decompose MMTTA into multiple unimodal feature alignment sub-problems. By leveraging the strong function approximation ability of prompt tuning, we calibrate the unimodal global feature distributions to their respective source distributions, so as to achieve the initial semantic re-alignment across modalities. Subsequently, we assign the credible pseudo-labels to combinations of masked and complete modalities, and introduce inter-modal instance-wise contrastive learning to further enhance the information interaction among modalities and refine the alignment. Extensive experiments on MMTTA tasks, including both corruption-based and real-world domain shift benchmarks, demonstrate the superiority of our method.

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