Singapore

Continual Visual Instruction Tuning (CVIT) enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to incrementally learn new tasks over time. However, this process is challenged by catastrophic forgetting, where performance on previously learned tasks deteriorates as the model adapts to new ones. A common approach to mitigate forgetting is architecture expansion, which introduces task-specific modules to prevent interference. Yet, existing methods often expand entire layers for each task, leading to significant parameter overhead and poor scalability. To overcome these issues, we introduce LoRA in LoRA (LiLoRA), a highly efficient architecture expansion method tailored for CVIT in MLLMs. LiLoRA shares the LoRA matrix $A$ across tasks to reduce redundancy, applies an additional low-rank decomposition to matrix $B$ to minimize task-specific parameters, and incorporates a cosine-regularized stability loss to preserve consistency in shared representations over time. Extensive experiments on a diverse CVIT benchmark show that LiLoRA consistently achieves superior performance in sequential task learning while significantly improving parameter efficiency compared to existing approaches.

AAAI 2026

LoRA in LoRA: Towards Parameter-Efficient Architecture Expansion for Continual Visual Instruction Tuning

ml: efficient ml / green ai

ml: large multimodal models (lmms)

ml: life-long and continual learning

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.

technical paper

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized training of graph neural networks while preserving data privacy. However, existing FGL methods are predominantly designed for static graphs and rely on parameter averaging or distribution alignment, which implicitly assume that all features are equally transferable across clients, overlooking both the spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the presence of client-specific knowledge in real-world graphs. In this paper, we identify that such assumptions create a vicious cycle of spurious representation entanglement, client-specific interference, and negative transfer, severely degrading generalization performance in Federated Learning over Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs (FSTG). To address this fundamental issue, we propose a novel causality-inspired framework named \textbf{SC-FSGL}, which explicitly decouples transferable causal knowledge from client-specific noise through representation-level interventions. Specifically, we introduce a Conditional Separation Module that simulates soft interventions through client-conditioned masks, enabling the disentanglement of invariant spatio-temporal causal factors from spurious signals and mitigating representation entanglement caused by client heterogeneity. In addition, we propose a Causal Codebook that clusters causal prototypes and aligns local representations via contrastive learning, promoting cross-client consistency and facilitating knowledge sharing across diverse spatio-temporal patterns. Experiments on five diverse heterogeneity STG datasets show that SC-FSGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its ability to learn generalizable causal representations.

Causality-inspired Federated Learning for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs

As urban data expands, existing spatio-temporal models encounter challenges such as high context dependency, poor cross-scenario generalization, and inefficient computational performance. To address these issues, we propose UrbanPG, an efficient and scalable framework for spatio-temporal learning. UrbanPG separates task-specific personalized patterns from general patterns, enabling unified spatio-temporal modeling and efficient knowledge generalization across scenarios. The key innovations of UrbanPG include: the development of a lightweight, context-independent general backbone utilizing linear spatio-temporal attention for scalable cross-scenario deployment; a personalized context prompt mechanism designed to model heterogeneity through spatio-temporal embeddings and random perturbation regularization, interacting with the backbone to enhance pattern differentiation; the proposal of multi spatio-temporal learning paradigms for rapid knowledge transfer and generalization to downstream tasks through fine-tuning personalized context prompts while freezing the backbone. Experimental results demonstrate that UrbanPG achieves state-of-the-art performance in large-scale forecasting, few-shot transfer, and continual learning tasks across eight real-world datasets, showcasing exceptional performance, strong generalization, and significant reductions in computational overhead.

UrbanPG: An Efficient Framework with Personalized Context and General Backbone Interaction for Urban Spatio-Temporal Learning

Hypergraphs provide a natural and expressive framework for modeling high-order relationships, enabling the representation of group-wise interactions beyond pairwise connections. While hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have shown promise for learning on such structures, existing models often rely on shallow message passing and lack the ability to extract multiscale patterns. Framelet-based techniques offer a principled solution by decomposing signals into multiple frequency bands. However, most prior framelet systems, particularly Haar-type ones, are sensitive to node ordering and fail to ensure consistent representations under permutation, leading to instability in hypergraph learning. To address this, we propose Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks (PEF-HNN), a novel framework that integrates multiscale framelet analysis with permutation-consistent learning. We construct a new family of permutation equivariant Haar-type framelets specifically designed for hypergraphs, supported by theoretical analysis of their stability and decomposition properties. Built upon these framelets, PEF-HNN incorporates both low-pass and high-pass components across multiple scales into a unified neural architecture. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets, including three homophilic and four heterophilic hypergraphs, as well as two real-world datasets for visual object classification, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, consistently outperforming existing HNN baselines and highlighting the advantages of permutation equivariant framelet design in hypergraph representation learning.

Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks

Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dual-arm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. 
To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. 
We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions.
We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.

A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation

Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve performance at test time by \emph{thinking longer}, but this often leads to overthinking and high computational cost. To address this, recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods adopt mechanical outcome-level rewards (e.g., rule- or prompt-based) that favor shorter correct paths, but frequently overlook reasoning quality. While such rewards neglect intermediate reasoning, dense supervision from process reward models (PRMs) has proven more effective in promoting coherent and high-quality reasoning. However, static PRM supervision introduces two challenges: \textit{reward hacking}, as fixed rewards poorly capture global reasoning objectives, and \textit{the high training cost} of obtaining dense reward labels at scale. To overcome these issues, we propose step group relative policy optimization (\textbf{Step-GRPO}), a GRPO-based method that integrates step-level PRM signals into sparse trajectory-level feedback, avoiding costly step-level supervision while enhancing reasoning quality beyond accuracy. In addition, Step-GRPO employs a step-attention mechanism that captures inter-step dependencies and emphasizes critical reasoning steps, effectively mitigating reward hacking. We apply Step-GRPO to train LLMs, achieving consistent gains in reasoning quality, accuracy, and shorter reasoning traces across multiple math benchmarks, outperforming RL baselines at substantially lower cost. Notably, the proposed model achieves 36.7\% accuracy on AIME’24 with 11K samples and ＄38 training cost, surpassing ＄1000+ baselines trained on 40K+ samples, demonstrating strong cost-effectiveness and scalability.

Step-GRPO: Enhancing Reasoning Quality and Efficiency via Structured PRM-Based Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex cooperative tasks by enabling decentralized yet efficient coordination among agents. However, during decentralized training, agent policy updates induced by different joint action samples may conflict, leading to gradient interference that hinders convergence and the emergence of coordinated behavior. In this paper, we analyze and empirically validate the phenomenon of gradient interference. To address this, we then propose Gradient-Protected Value Decomposition (GPVD), a novel MARL framework that explicitly protects the gradient signals of optimal collaborative actions by suppressing the impact of interfering actions. GPVD employs a dynamic gradient protection mechanism that identifies optimal collaborative joint actions and reweights the loss to attenuate gradients from non-collaborative interfering actions. To effectively identify high-value collaborative actions, we apply SimHash-based state grouping to discover consistent collaboration patterns across similar states. Furthermore, a count-based intrinsic reward is incorporated to encourage exploration and improve the coverage of potentially optimal joint actions. Experiments on challenging multi-agent benchmarks demonstrate that GPVD achieves faster convergence, stronger coordination, and greater training stability compared to state-of-the-art value decomposition methods.

Gradient-Protected Value Decomposition for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth’s surface, remains an open challenge.
We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture.
First, we introduce Aerial-Earth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m$\times$600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames.
Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity.
Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation:
1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 
2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation.
The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D.

EarthCrafter: Scalable 3D Earth Generation via Dual-Sparse Latent Diffusion

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but Vision–Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with multi-step reasoning tasks due to limited multimodal reasoning data. To bridge this gap, researchers have explored methods to transfer CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. However, existing approaches either need high training costs or require architectural alignment. In this paper, we use Linear Artificial Tomography (LAT) to empirically show that LLMs and VLMs share similar low-frequency latent representations of CoT reasoning despite architectural differences. Based on this insight, we propose **L2V-CoT**, a novel training-free latent intervention approach that transfers CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. **L2V-CoT** extracts and resamples low-frequency CoT representations from LLMs in the frequency domain, enabling dimension matching and latent injection into VLMs during inference to enhance reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms training-free baselines and even surpasses supervised methods.

L2V-CoT: Cross-Modal Transfer of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Latent Intervention

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have enabled a new frontier in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), offering superior performance by activating only a fraction of their total parameters during inference. However, their practical deployment is severely hampered by substantial static memory overhead, as all experts must be loaded into memory. Existing post-training pruning methods, while reducing model size, often derive their pruning criteria from a single, general-purpose corpus. This leads to a critical limitation: a catastrophic performance degradation when the pruned model is applied to other domains, necessitating a costly re-pruning for each new domain. To address this generalization gap, we introduce Mosaic Pruning (MoP). The core idea of MoP is to construct a functionally comprehensive set of experts through a structured ``cluster-then-select" process. This process leverages a similarity metric that captures expert performance across different task domains to functionally cluster the experts, and subsequently selects the most representative expert from each cluster based on our proposed Activation Variability Score. Unlike methods that optimize for a single corpus, our proposed Mosaic Pruning ensures that the pruned model retains a functionally complementary set of experts, much like the tiles of a mosaic that together form a complete picture of the original model's capabilities, enabling it to handle diverse downstream tasks.Extensive experiments on various MoE models demonstrate the superiority of our approach. MoP significantly outperforms prior work, achieving a 7.24\% gain on general tasks and 8.92\% on specialized tasks like math reasoning and code generation. Code will be made available at supplementary materials.

Mosaic Pruning: A Hierarchical Framework for Generalizable Pruning of Mixture-of-Experts Models

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) via benchmarks is widespread, yet inconsistencies between different leaderboards and poor separability among top models raise concerns about their ability to accurately reflect authentic model capabilities. This paper provides a critical analysis of benchmark effectiveness, examining mainstream prominent LLM benchmarks using results from diverse models. We first propose Pseudo-Siamese Network for Item Response Theory (PSN-IRT), an enhanced Item Response Theory framework that incorporates a rich set of item parameters within an IRT-grounded architecture. PSN-IRT can be utilized for accurate and reliable estimations of item characteristics and model abilities. Based on PSN-IRT, we conduct extensive analysis on 11 LLM benchmarks comprising 41,871 items, revealing significant and varied shortcomings in their measurement quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that leveraging PSN-IRT is able to construct smaller benchmarks while maintaining stronger alignment with human preference.

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Causality-inspired Federated Learning for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs

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Decomposing and Composing: Towards Efficient Vision-Language Continual Learning via Rank-1 Expert Pool in a Single LoRA