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Online continual learning (OCL) aims at learning a non-stationary data stream in a way of reading each data sample only once, and hence suffers from the trade-off of catastrophic forgetting and insufficient learning. In this work, we firstly analytically establish relationship between loss functions and model parameters from the Bayesian perspective. Based on our analysis, we subsequently propose a parameter merging method with gradient-guided supermasks. Our method leverages 1-order and 2-order gradient information to construct supermasks that determine the merging weights between the old and new models. Our method performs direct arithmetic operations on parameters to update models, beyond traditional gradient descent. We further discover that a widely-used premise that 1-order gradients can be negligible is invalid in OCL, due to slow convergence incurred by insufficient learning. Additionally, we utilize a dual-model dual-view distillation strategy that can align output distributions of the new and merged models for each sample, further enhancing model performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmarks in OCL settings, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-100. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective, and achieves a substantial boost over previous methods.

AAAI 2026

Parameter Merging with Gradient-Guided Supermasks in Online Continual Learning

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.

poster

Human-AI cooperative classification (HAI-CC) aims to develop hybrid intelligent systems that enhance decision-making in various high-stakes real-world scenarios by leveraging both human expertise and AI capabilities. Current HAI-CC methods primarily focus on learning-to-defer (L2D), where decisions are deferred to human experts when AI is not confident, and learning-to-complement (L2C), where AI and human experts make predictions cooperatively. However, existing research in both L2D and L2C has not effectively been explored under diverse expert knowledge to improve decision-making, particularly when constrained by the operation cost of human involvement. In this paper, we address this research gap by proposing the Coverage-constrained Learning to Defer and Complement with Specific Experts (CL2DC) method. In particular, CL2DC assesses input data before making final decisions through either AI prediction alone or by deferring to or complementing a specific human expert. Furthermore, we propose a coverage-constrained optimisation to control the cooperation cost, ensuring it approximates a target probability for AI-only selection. This approach enables an effective assessment of system performance within a specified budget. Comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that CL2DC achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art HAI-CC methods.

Coverage-Constrained Human-AI Cooperation with Multiple Experts

LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit strong collaborative capabilities but often suffer from redundant communication and excessive token overhead. Existing methods typically enhance efficiency through pretrained GNNs or greedy algorithms, but often isolate pre- and post-task optimization, lacking a unified strategy. To this end, we present SafeSieve, a progressive and adaptive multi-agent pruning algorithm that dynamically refines the inter-agent communication through a novel dual-mechanism. SafeSieve integrates initial LLM-based semantic evaluation with accumulated performance feedback, enabling a smooth transition from heuristic initialization to experience-driven refinement. Unlike existing greedy Top-k pruning methods, SafeSieve employs 0-extension clustering to preserve structurally coherent agent groups while eliminating ineffective links. Experiments across benchmarks (SVAMP, HumanEval, etc.) showcase that SafeSieve achieves 94.01\% average accuracy while reducing token usage by 12.4\%-27.8\%. Results further demonstrate robustness under prompt injection attacks (1.23\% average accuracy drop). In heterogeneous settings, SafeSieve reduces deployment costs by 13.3\% while maintaining performance. These results establish SafeSieve as a robust, efficient, and scalable framework for practical multi-agent systems. Our code can be found in the Supplementary Material.

SafeSieve: From Heuristics to Experience in Progressive Pruning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Communication

Conventional fairness in multi-tenant Large Language Model (LLM) inference services is typically defined by system-centric metrics, such as equitable resource allocation. This paper argues that this paradigm is fundamentally flawed, as it creates a gap between measured system performance and actual user-perceived quality. We challenge this notion by introducing and formalizing Experiential Fairness, a user-centric paradigm that shifts the objective from equality of opportunity (resource access) to equity of outcome (user experience). To operationalize this, we propose ExFairS, a lightweight scheduling framework that evaluates each user's state via a composite metric integrating SLO compliance with resource consumption, and then acts on this evaluation through a credit-based priority mechanism. Extensive experiments on an 8-GPU NVIDIA V100 node show that ExFairS reduces the SLO violation rate by up to 100% and improves system throughput by 14-21.9%, outperforming state-of-the-art schedulers and delivering a demonstrably higher degree of Experiential Fairness.

Experiential Fairness: Bridging the Gap Between User Experience and Resource-Centric Fairness in Online LLM Services

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly accelerated the adoption of speech recognition technology, leading to its widespread integration across various applications. However, this surge in usage also highlights a critical issue: audio data is highly vulnerable to unauthorized exposure and analysis, posing significant privacy risks for businesses and individuals. This paper introduces an Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example (IO-RAE) framework, the pioneering method designed to safeguard audio privacy using reversible adversarial examples. IO-RAE leverages large language models to generate misleading yet contextually coherent content, effectively preventing unauthorized eavesdropping by humans and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Additionally, we propose the Cumulative Signal Attack technique, which mitigates high-frequency noise and enhances attack efficacy by targeting low-frequency signals. Our approach ensures the protection of audio data without degrading its quality or usability. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a targeted misguidance rate of 96.5% and a remarkable 100% untargeted misguidance rate in obfuscating target keywords across multiple ASR models, including a commercial black-box system from Google. Furthermore, the quality of the recovered audio, measured by the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality score, reached 4.45, comparable to high-quality original recordings. Notably, the recovered audio processed by ASR systems exhibited an error rate of 0%, indicating nearly lossless recovery. These results highlight the practical applicability and effectiveness of our IO-RAE framework in protecting sensitive audio privacy.

IO-RAE: Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example for Audio Privacy Protection

Sparse Urban CrowdSensing (Sparse UCS) is a practical paradigm for completing full sensing maps from limited observations. However, existing methods typically rely on a time-discrete assumption, where data is considered static within fixed intervals. This simplification introduces significant errors as real-world data changes continuously. To address this, we propose a framework for time-continuous data completion. Our approach, Time-Aware Mamba-based Deep Matrix Factorization (TIME-DMF), leverages the Mamba architecture as a powerful temporal encoder. Crucially, we enhance Mamba with a novel time-aware mechanism that explicitly incorporates the actual, often irregular, physical time intervals between observations into its state transitions. This allows our model to accurately capture true temporal dynamics and generate high-fidelity data for any queried moment in time through a query-generate mechanism. Extensive experiments on five diverse sensing tasks demonstrate that TIME-DMF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the superiority of the time-continuous paradigm for Sparse UCS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Time-DMF-B373/.

Toward Time-Continuous Data Inference in Sparse Urban CrowdSensing

Structured sparsity has emerged as a popular model pruning technique, widely adopted in various architectures, including CNNs, Transformer models, and especially large language models (LLMs) in recent years. A promising direction to further improve post-pruning performance is weight permutation, which reorders model weights into patterns more amenable to pruning. However, the exponential growth of the permutation search space with the scale of Transformer architectures forces most methods to rely on greedy or heuristic algorithms, limiting the effectiveness of reordering.


In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable permutation framework. Our method introduces a learnable permutation cost matrix to quantify the cost of swapping any two input channels
of a given weight matrix, a differentiable bipartite matching solver to obtain the optimal binary permutation matrix given a cost matrix, and a sparsity optimization loss function to directly optimize the permutation operator.
We extensively validate our approach on vision and language Transformers, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art permutation results for structured sparsity.

Learnable Permutation for Structured Sparsity on Transformer Models

Recent advances in model compression have highlighted the potential of low-bit precision techniques, with Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) attracting attention for their extreme efficiency. However, extreme quantization in BNNs limits representational capacity and destabilizes training, posing significant challenges for lightweight architectures with depth-wise convolutions.
To address this, we propose a 1.58-bit convolution to enhance expressiveness and a pre-BN residual connection to stabilize optimization by improving the Hessian condition number. These innovations enable the first successful binarization of depth-wise convolutions in BNNs.
Our method achieves 32M OPs on ImageNet with MobileNet V1, establishing a new state-of-the-art in BNNs by outperforming prior methods with comparable OPs. Moreover, it consistently outperforms existing methods on various datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, Tiny ImageNet, and Oxford Flowers 102, with accuracy improvements of up to 9.3 percentage points.

BD-Net: Has Depth-Wise Convolution Ever Been Applied in Binary Neural Networks?

Economic decision‑making depends not only on structured signals—such as prices and taxes—but also on unstructured language, including peer dialogue and media narratives. While multi‑agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise in optimizing economic decisions, it struggles with the semantic ambiguity and contextual richness of language. We propose LAMP (Language‑Augmented Multi‑Agent Policy), the first framework to integrate language into economic decision‑making, narrowing the gap to real‑world settings.
LAMP follows a Think–Speak–Decide pipeline:
(1) Think interprets numerical observations to extract short‑term shocks and long‑term trends, caching high‑value reasoning trajectories.
(2) Speak crafts and exchanges strategic messages based on the reasoning, updating beliefs by parsing peer communications.
(3) Decide fuses numerical data, reasoning, and reflections into a MARL policy to optimize language‑augmented decision‑making.
Experiments in economic simulation show that LAMP outperforms both MARL and LLM‑only baselines in cumulative return (+63.5%, +34.0%), robustness (+18.8%, +59.4%), and interpretability. These results demonstrates the potential of language‑augmented policies to deliver more effective and robust economic strategies.

Think, Speak, Decide: Language-Augmented Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Economic Decision-Making

Reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) images from low dynamic range (LDR) bursts plays an essential role in the computational photography. Impressive progress has been achieved by learning-based algorithms which require LDRHDR image pairs. However, these pairs are hard to be obtained, which motivates researchers to delve into the problem of annotation-efficient HDR image reconstructing: how to achieve comparable performance with limited HDR ground truths (GTs). This work attempts to address this problem from the view of semi-supervised learning where a teacher model generates pseudo HDR GTs for the LDR samples without GTs and a student model learns from pseudo GTs. Nevertheless, the confirmation bias, i.e., the student may learn from the artifacts in pseudo HDR GTs, presents an impediment. Trying to remove this impediment, an uncertainty-based masking process is proposed to discard unreliable parts of pseudo GTs on both pixel and patch levels, then trusted area can be learned by the student. With this novel masking process, our semi-supervised HDR reconstructing method not only outperforms previous annotation-efficient algorithms, but also achieves comparable performance with up-to-date fully-supervised methods by using only 6.7% HDR GTs.

Semi-Supervised High Dynamic Range Image Reconstructing via Bi-Level Uncertain Area Masking

Hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling high-order relationships in complex systems. However, most existing HNNs are designed under the assumption of homophily, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios where connected nodes often exhibit diverse semantics, i.e., heterophily. This inconsistency leads to suboptimal aggregation and degraded performance, especially in low-label regimes. While a few recent methods have attempted to enhance heterophilic hypergraph learning, they often rely heavily on label supervision and overlook the potential of self-supervised techniques. In this paper, we propose HeroCL, a heterophily-aware contrastive learning framework that improves hypergraph representation under both structural heterogeneity and label scarcity. Specifically, HeroCL integrates a multi-hop neighbor encoding module to capture informative higher-order context and incorporates two complementary contrastive objectives, label-aware and structure-aware, to guide representation learning from both semantic and relational perspectives. A multi-granularity contrastive strategy is introduced to exploit latent signals across multiple neighborhood levels. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets against 11 existing baselines demonstrate that HeroCL achieves consistent and significant performance gains, particularly under strong heterophily and limited supervision, validating its robustness and effectiveness.

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