Singapore

Strategic machine learning investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to receive favorable decisions from predictive models. To address fairness concerns intrinsic to strategic classification, recent work has introduced group-specific fairness constraints. However, current fairness-aware approaches face a fundamental dilemma in the issue of fairness exposure: making these constraints public enables strategic manipulation and can lead to fairness reversal, while keeping them hidden may reduce social welfare and discourage genuine improvement.
To fill this gap, we subsequently propose the problem of Partial Fairness Awareness (PFA), as our theoretical analysis informs that such a dilemma can be mitigated by releasing the candidate set of fairness constraints and concealing the grounding constraint. 
To be specific, we introduce a belief-guided strategic mechanism wherein agents iteratively interact with the decision system and maintain a belief distribution over the candidate set of fairness constraints. This belief-guided process enables agents, through iterative interaction and feedback, to update their belief distribution over the candidate set, thereby gradually aligning their belief with the grounding fairness constraint employed by the system.
Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PFA achieves lower group fairness gaps, higher acceptance of truly qualified individuals, and more stable outcomes compared to fully public or private fairness regimes.

AAAI 2026

Partial Fairness Awareness: Belief-Guided Strategic Mechanism for Strategic Agents

strategic classification

machine learning

fairness

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Point cloud data augmentation is critical to improving the generalization of 3D deep learning models. However, existing methods often fail to preserve the underlying manifold structure, leading to semantic distortion or topology violation. This causes models to learn untrustworthy features, thereby limiting the representational ability of the model. To overcome these limitations, we propose ManiPoint, a novel point cloud augmentation framework based on diffeomorphism that explicitly preserves manifold structure during deformation. ManiPoint constructs diffeomorphic transformations via continuous differentiable mappings, ensuring topological consistency and geometric continuity between original and augmented data. To prevent excessive distortion and ensure semantic consistency, we introduce a controllable deformation mechanism that quantitatively constrains the augmentation magnitude and enables fine-grained control over the deformation space. We further provide theoretical analysis, indicating that, compared with topologically inconsistent methods, ManiPoint reduces empirical and vicinal risks by generating diverse and structurally reliable samples. Extensive experiments and visualizations on object-level datasets demonstrate that ManiPoint produces high-quality augmentations and consistently improves model robustness over existing baselines. Meanwhile, the scalability of our method was further verified on the scene-level datasets.

Shaping Without Tearing: Controllable Diffeomorphic Deformations for Topology-Preserving 3D Point Cloud Augmentation

Precise modeling of lane topology is essential for autonomous driving, as it directly impacts navigation and control decisions. Existing methods typically represent each lane with a single query and infer topological connectivity based on the similarity between lane queries.
However, this kind of design struggles to accurately model complex lane structures, leading to unreliable topology prediction. In this view, we propose a Fine-Grained lane topology reasoning framework (TopoFG). It divides the procedure from bird’s-eye-view (BEV) features to topology prediction via fine-grained queries into three phases, i.e., Hierarchical Prior Extractor (HPE), Region-Focused Decoder (RFD), and Robust Boundary-Point Topology Reasoning (RBTR). Specifically, HPE extracts global spatial priors from the BEV mask and local sequential priors from in-lane keypoint sequences to guide subsequent fine-grained query modeling. RFD constructs fine-grained queries by integrating the spatial and sequential priors. It then samples reference points in RoI regions of the mask and applies cross-attention with BEV features to refine the query representations of each lane. RBTR models lane connectivity based on boundary-point query features and further employs a topological denoising strategy to reduce matching ambiguity. By integrating spatial and sequential priors into fine-grained queries and applying a denoising strategy to boundary-point topology reasoning, our method precisely models complex lane structures and delivers trustworthy topology predictions. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoFG achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with an OLS of 48.0% on subset_A and 45.4% on subset_B.

Fine-Grained Representation for Lane Topology Reasoning

Prevailing quantization techniques in Learned Image Compression (LIC) typically employ a static, uniform bit-width across all layers, failing to adapt to the highly diverse data distributions and sensitivity characteristics inherent in LIC models. This leads to a suboptimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DynaQuant, a novel framework for dynamic mixed-precision quantization that operates on two complementary levels. First, we propose content-aware quantization, where learnable scaling and offset parameters dynamically adapt to the statistical variations of latent features. This fine-grained adaptation is trained end-to-end using a novel Distance-aware Gradient Modulator (DGM), which provides a more informative learning signal than the standard Straight-Through Estimator. Second, we introduce a data-driven, dynamic bit-width selector that learns to assign an optimal bit precision to each layer, dynamically reconfiguring the network's precision profile based on the input data. Our fully dynamic approach offers substantial flexibility in balancing rate-distortion (R-D) performance and computational cost. Experiments demonstrate that DynaQuant achieves R-D performance comparable to full-precision models while significantly reducing computational and storage requirements, thereby enabling the practical deployment of advanced LIC on diverse hardware platforms.

DynaQuant: Dynamic Mixed-Precision Quantization for Learned Image Compression

Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental machine-learning technique for grouping data points into dendrograms.
However, existing hierarchical clustering methods encounter two primary challenges: 1) Most methods specify dendrograms without a global objective.
2) Graph-based methods often neglect the significance of graph structure, optimizing objectives on complete or static predefined graphs.
In this work, we propose $\textbf{Hyp}$erbolic $\textbf{C}$ontinuous $\textbf{S}$tructural $\textbf{E}$ntropy neural networks, namely HypCSE, for structure-enhanced continuous hierarchical clustering.
Our key idea is to map data points in the hyperbolic space and minimize the relaxed continuous structural entropy (SE) on structure-enhanced graphs. 
Specifically, we encode graph vertices in hyperbolic space using hyperbolic graph neural networks and minimize approximate SE defined on graph embeddings.
To make the SE objective differentiable for optimization, we reformulate it into a function using the lowest common ancestor (LCA) on trees and then relax it into continuous SE (CSE) by the analogy of hyperbolic graph embeddings and partitioning trees.
To ensure a graph structure that effectively captures the hierarchy of data points for CSE calculation, we employ a graph structure learning (GSL) strategy that updates the graph structure during training.
Extensive experiments on seven datasets demonstrate the superior performance of HypCSE.

Hyperbolic Continuous Structural Entropy for Hierarchical Clustering

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to dynamically model a student’s mastery of knowledge concepts based on their historical learning interactions. Most current methods rely on single-point estimates, which cannot distinguish true ability from outburst or carelessness, creating ambiguity in judging mastery. To address this issue, we propose a Knowledge Mastery-State Disambiguation for Knowledge Tracing model (KeenKT), which represents a student’s knowledge state at each interaction using a Normal-Inverse-Gaussian (NIG) distribution, thereby capturing the fluctuations in student learning behaviors. Furthermore, we design an NIG-distance-based attention mechanism to model the dynamic evolution of the knowledge state. In addition, we introduce a diffusion-based denoising reconstruction loss and a distributional contrastive learning loss to enhance the model’s robustness. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that KeenKT outperforms state-of-the-art KT models in terms of prediction accuracy and sensitivity to behavioral fluctuations. The proposed method yields the maximum AUC improvement of 5.85% and the maximum ACC improvement of 6.89%.

KeenKT: Knowledge Mastery-State Disambiguation for Knowledge Tracing

Large Reasoning Language Models (LRMs) have recently shown remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their extensive reasoning chains incur substantial computational overhead. 
To address this challenge, we propose Outlier-aware Reasoning Conciseness Adaptive Merge (ORCA), a novel plug-and-play model merging framework that leverages outlier activation patterns to fuse base models with reasoning models. Our ORCA introduces three key innovations: (1) adaptive alignment that reduces conflicts between disparate activation patterns during merging, (2) outlier-guided allocation that assigns merging coefficients proportional to each layer's reasoning importance as indicated by outlier concentrations, and (3) dynamic probe-based adjustment that adapts merging coefficients during inference based on input-specific activation characteristics. These strategies allow seamless integration into existing merging pipelines while creating unified models that maintain reasoning accuracy with significantly reduced response verbosity. Comprehensive evaluation across six benchmarks using Qwen and LLaMA models shows ORCA reduces average response length by 55\% while improving accuracy by 2.4$\sim$5.7\% over existing methods. Code is in the supplemental.

Outlier Matters: Efficient Long-to-Short Reasoning via Outlier-Guided Model Merging

Object detection in sonar images is a key technology in underwater detection systems. Compared to natural images, sonar images contain fewer texture details and are more susceptible to noise, making it difficult for non-experts to distinguish subtle differences between classes. This leads to their inability to provide precise annotation data for sonar images. Therefore, designing effective object detection methods for sonar images with extremely limited labels is particularly important. To address this, we propose a teacher-student framework called RSOD, which aims to fully learn the characteristics of sonar images and develop a pseudo-label strategy suitable for these images to mitigate the impact of limited labels. First, RSOD calculates a reliability score by assessing the consistency of the teacher's predictions across different views. To leverage this score, we introduce an object mixed pseudo-label method to tackle the shortage of labeled data in sonar images. Finally, we optimize the performance of the student by implementing a reliability-guided adaptive constraint. By taking full advantage of unlabeled data, the student can perform well even in situations with extremely limited labels. Notably, on the UATD dataset, our method, using only 5% of labeled data, achieves results that can compete against those of our baseline algorithm trained on 100% labeled data. We also collected a new dataset to provide more valuable data for research in the field of sonar.

RSOD: Reliability-Guided Sonar Image Object Detection with Extremely Limited Labels

Mainstream multimodal large language models (MLLMs) rely on patch-based tokenization methods, which compromise the integrity of objects and thereby limit the model's perception capabilities while triggering object-related hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose ObjecTok, an innovative object tokenization framework. ObjecTok generates a single, holistic object token for each object in an image. This token is produced by a specially trained object encoder that embeds the object's semantic, positional, and shape information into a single compact representation, thereby preserving the object's integrity. To mitigate the imperfections of upstream object proposer models, we introduce learnable confidence embeddings. These embeddings enable the MLLM to learn the reliability of each object's information, significantly enhancing the model's robustness. Additionally, ObjecTok employs a hybrid input strategy, combining object tokens with traditional image patch tokens, allowing the model to leverage both object-level information and global scene context. By integrating ObjecTok into the LLaVA architecture, we achieve notable performance improvements on multiple object-centric benchmarks, effectively reducing object hallucinations and enhancing perception capabilities. Experimental results robustly demonstrate that the object tokens generated by our ObjecTok framework hold great potential for building more powerful and reliable MLLMs.

ObjecTok: Learning Holistic and Robust Object Tokens for MLLMs

Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) discern confused objects that are visually present but audio-absent? To study this, we introduce a new benchmark, AV-ConfuseBench, which simulates an “Audio-Visual Confusion” scene by modifying the corresponding sound of an object in the video, e.g., mute the sounding object and ask MLLMs “Is there a/an {muted-object} sound”. Experimental results reveal that MLLMs, such as Qwen2.5-Omni and Gemini 2.5, struggle to discriminate non-existent audio due to visually dominated reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we introduce RL-CoMM, a Reinforcement Learning-based Collaborative Multi-MLLM that is built upon the Qwen2.5-Omni foundation. RL-CoMM includes two stages: 1) To alleviate visually dominated ambiguities, we introduce an external model, a Large Audio Language Model (LALM), as the reference model to generate audio-only reasoning. Then, we design a Step-wise Reasoning Reward function that enables MLLMs to self-improve audio-visual reasoning with the audio-only reference. 2) To ensure an accurate answer prediction, we introduce Answer-centered Confidence Optimization to reduce the uncertainty of potential heterogeneous reasoning differences. Extensive experiments on audio-visual question answering and audio-visual hallucination show that RL-CoMM improves accuracy by 10~30% over the baseline model with limited training data.

When Eyes and Ears Disagree: Can MLLMs Discern Audio-Visual Confusion?

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a crucial role in many real-world applications, such as weather prediction and economic planning. While Transformer-based models have shown strong capabilities in modeling long-range dependencies, effectively capturing the multi-scale temporal dynamics inherent in time series remains a major challenge. Existing methods often adopt time-windows of varying sizes, which may introduce noisy or irrelevant representations when mismatched with the underlying temporal patterns, potentially leading to overfitting. In this paper, we propose Sparse-Scale Transformer (SSformer) with Bidirectional Awareness for Time Series Forecasting to enhance the multi-scale modeling for time series. Specifically, we propose a novel Sparse-Scale Convolution (SSC) block that imposes sparsity on scales to obtain the informative representations by evaluating the intra-scale segment similarity of time series, and utilizes scale-specific convolutions to extract local patterns. Furthermore, we design a Bidirectional-Scale Interaction (BSI) block to explicitly model scale correlations in both coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse directions. Finally, scale predictions are ensembled to fully exploit the complementary forecasting capabilities across scales. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that SSformer achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior efficiency. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yingliu-coder/SSformer}.

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