Singapore

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLM-based KGR methods still face two critical limitations. First, existing methods often extract reasoning paths indiscriminately, without assessing their different importance, which may introduce irrelevant noise that misleads LLMs. Second, while many methods leverage LLMs to dynamically explore potential reasoning paths, they require high retrieval demands and frequent LLM calls. To address these limitations, we propose PathMind, a novel framework designed to enhance faithful and interpretable reasoning by selectively guiding LLMs with important reasoning paths. Specifically, PathMind follows a &quot;Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason&quot; paradigm. First, it retrieves a query subgraph from KG through the retrieval module. Next, it introduces a path prioritization mechanism that identifies important reasoning paths using a semantic-aware path priority function, which simultaneously considers the accumulative cost and the estimated future cost for reaching the target. Finally, PathMind generates accurate and logically consistent responses via a dual-phase training strategy, including task-specific instruction tuning and path-wise preference alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PathMind consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on complex reasoning tasks with fewer input tokens, by identifying essential reasoning paths.

AAAI 2026

PathMind: A Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

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knowledge graph reasoning

knowledge graphs

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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLM-based KGR methods still face two critical limitations. First, existing methods often extract reasoning paths indiscriminately, without assessing their different importance, which may introduce irrelevant noise that misleads LLMs. Second, while many methods leverage LLMs to dynamically explore potential reasoning paths, they require high retrieval demands and frequent LLM calls. To address these limitations, we propose PathMind, a novel framework designed to enhance faithful and interpretable reasoning by selectively guiding LLMs with important reasoning paths. Specifically, PathMind follows a "Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason" paradigm. First, it retrieves a query subgraph from KG through the retrieval module. Next, it introduces a path prioritization mechanism that identifies important reasoning paths using a semantic-aware path priority function, which simultaneously considers the accumulative cost and the estimated future cost for reaching the target. Finally, PathMind generates accurate and logically consistent responses via a dual-phase training strategy, including task-specific instruction tuning and path-wise preference alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PathMind consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on complex reasoning tasks with fewer input tokens, by identifying essential reasoning paths.

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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.

Video-based human pose estimation has long been a nontrivial task due to its dynamic nature and challenging detection scenarios such as occlusion and defocus. Inspired by the success of diffusion models, researchers have applied them to video pose estimation, outperforming traditional joint detection methods. However, existing diffusion model-based methods still face challenges like slow convergence and unstable pose generation. To tackle these issues, we propose DiffusionPose, a novel framework for video pose estimation that integrates diffusion models with optimization strategies: (1) We combine the emerging Mamba with Transformers to balance global and local spatio-temporal modeling. (2)We integrate Markov Random Fields into the reverse diffusion process to enhance the denoising of pose heatmaps, particularly addressing the issue of confused generation of occluded joints. (3) We mathematically formulate a Markov objective to supervise the heatmap denoising process, enabling the model to generate anatomically plausible skeletons. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. Interestingly, it shows surprising robustness in challenging video scenarios, improving the accuracy of the most difficult ankle joint by 16.9\% compared to the previous best diffusion model-based method on the Challenging-PoseTrack dataset.

DiffusionPose: Markov-Optimized Diffusion Model for Human Pose Estimation

Fairness in multi-agent systems (MAS) focuses on equitable reward distribution among agents in scenarios involving sensitive attributes such as race, gender, or socioeconomic status. This paper introduces fairness in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a penalty term derived from a fairness definition such as demographic parity, counterfactual fairness, or conditional statistical parity. 
The proposed method, which we call Fair-PPO, balances reward maximisation with fairness by integrating two penalty components: a retrospective component that minimises disparities in past outcomes and a prospective component that ensures fairness in future decision-making.
We evaluate our approach in two games: the Allelopathic Harvest, a cooperative and competitive MAS focused on resource collection, where some agents possess a sensitive attribute, and HospitalSim, a hospital simulation, in which agents coordinate the operations of hospital patients with different mobility and priority needs. Experiments show that Fair-PPO achieves fairer policies than PPO across the fairness metrics and, through the retrospective and prospective penalty components, reveals a wide spectrum of strategies to improve fairness; at the same time, its performance pairs with that of state-of-the-art fair reinforcement-learning algorithms. Fairness comes at the cost of reduced efficiency, but does not compromise equality among the overall population (Gini index). These findings underscore the potential of Fair-PPO to address fairness challenges in MAS.

Fairness Aware Reinforcement Learning via Proximal Policy Optimization

Alpha factor mining is pivotal in quantitative investment for identifying predictive signals from complex financial data. While traditional formulaic alpha mining relies on human expertise, contemporary automated methods, such as those based on genetic programming or reinforcement learning, often struggle with search inefficiency or yield alpha factors that are difficult to interpret. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages the LLM's instruction-following and reasoning capability to iteratively generate and refine symbolic alpha formulas within an MCTS-driven exploration. A key innovation is the guidance of MCTS exploration by rich, quantitative feedback from financial backtesting of each candidate factor, enabling efficient navigation of the vast search space. Furthermore, a frequent subtree avoidance mechanism is introduced to enhance search diversity and prevent formulaic homogenization, further improving performance. Experimental results on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our LLM-based framework outperforms existing methods by mining alphas with superior predictive accuracy and trading performance. The resulting formulas are also more amenable to human interpretation, establishing a more effective and efficient paradigm for formulaic alpha mining.

Navigating the Alpha Jungle: An LLM-Powered MCTS Framework for Formulaic Alpha Factor Mining

Collaborative perception enables connected vehicles to share information, overcoming occlusions and extending the limited sensing range inherent in single-agent (non-collaborative) systems. Existing vision-only methods for 3D semantic occupancy prediction commonly rely on dense 3D voxels, which incur high communication costs, or 2D planar features, which require accurate depth estimation or additional supervision, limiting their applicability to collaborative scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the first approach leveraging sparse 3D semantic Gaussians for collaborative 3D semantic occupancy prediction. By sharing and fusing intermediate Gaussian primitives, our method provides three benefits: a neighborhood-based cross-agent fusion that removes duplicates and suppresses noisy or inconsistent Gaussians; a joint encoding of geometry and semantics in each primitive, which reduces reliance on depth supervision and allows simple rigid alignment; and sparse, object-centric messages that preserve structural information while reducing communication volume. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms single-agent perception and baseline collaborative methods by +8.42 and +3.28 points in mIoU, and +5.11 and +22.41 points in IoU, respectively. When further reducing the number of transmitted Gaussians, our method still achieves a +1.9 improvement in mIoU, using only 34.6% communication volume, highlighting robust performance under limited communication budgets.

Vision-Only Gaussian Splatting for Collaborative Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Multimodal Model Editing (MMED) aims to correct erroneous knowledge in multimodal models. Existing evaluation methods, adapted from textual model editing, focus on fact recall and prediction preservation for unrelated inputs to assess locality. However, these typically rely on low-similarity or random input pairs, which can overstate editing success and obscure overfitting effects. To address this limitation, we propose a comprehensive locality evaluation framework for MMED, spanning three key dimensions: **random-image locality, no-image locality,** and **consistent-image locality**. These dimensions are operationalized through seven distinct data types, enabling a detailed and structured analysis of multimodal edits. In addition, we introduce **dynamic evaluation for visual question answering (De-VQA)**, which dynamically selects data samples based on the specific edits applied. This exposes limitations in existing locality metrics. Using De-VQA, we uncover a phenomenon we term **transient blindness**, a form of overfitting where edited models overly rely on textual input similar to the edit, while disregarding relevant visual information. We analyze this effect by quantifying cross-modal token contributions, revealing that edits tend to disproportionately affect textual tokens, resulting in excessive dependence on language. To mitigate this problem, we propose locality-aware adversarial losses that encourage a more balanced integration of textual and visual representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, reducing transient blindness and improving locality preservation by an average of 17\% across multiple models and datasets.

Uncovering and Mitigating Transient Blindness in Multimodal Model Editing

Rectified Flow (RF) has been widely used as an effective generative model. Although RF is primarily based on probability flow Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), recent studies have shown that injecting noise through reverse-time Stochastic Differential Equations (SDE) for sampling can achieve superior generative performance. Inspired by Positive-incentive Noise ($\pi$-noise), we propose an innovative generative algorithm to train $\pi$-noise generators, namely Rectified Noise ($\Delta$RN), which improves the generative performance by injecting $\pi$-noise into the velocity field of pre-trained RF models. After introducing the Rectified Noise pipeline, pre-trained RF models can be efficiently transformed into $\pi$-noise generators. We validate Rectified Noise by conducting extensive experiments across various model architectures on different datasets. Notably, we find that: (1) RF models using Rectified Noise reduce FID from10.16 to 9.05 on ImageNet-1k. (2) The models of $\pi$-noise generators achieve improved performance with only 0.39\% additional training parameters.

Rectified Noise: A Generative Model Using Positive-incentive Noise

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuation functions to achieve both fairness and efficiency under the constraint that each agent receives exactly the same number of goods (the balanced constraint). While this constraint is common in real-world scenarios such as team drafts or asset division, it significantly complicates the search for allocations that are both fair and efficient. Envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) is a well-established fairness notion for indivisible goods. Pareto optimality (PO) and its stronger variant, fractional Pareto optimality (fPO), are widely accepted efficiency criteria. Our main contribution establishes both the existence and polynomial-time computability of allocations that are simultaneously EF1 and fPO under balanced constraints in two fundamental cases: (1) when agents have at most two distinct types of valuation functions, and (2) when each agent has a personalized bivalued valuation. Our algorithms leverage novel applications of maximum-weight matching in bipartite graphs and duality theory, providing the first polynomial-time solutions for these cases and offering new insights for constrained fair division problems.

Fair and Efficient Balanced Allocation for Indivisible Goods

Recent advances in training-free visual prompting, such as Set-of-Mark, have emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the grounding capabilities of multimodal language models (MLMs). These techniques operate by partitioning the input image into object regions and annotating them with marks–predominantly boxes with numeric identifiers–before feeding the augmented image to the MLM. However, these approaches treat marked objects as isolated entities, failing to capture the relationships between them. On these premises, we propose Graph-of-Mark (GoM), the first pixel-level visual prompting technique that overlays scene graphs onto the input image for spatial reasoning tasks. We evaluate GoM across 3 open-source MLMs and 4 different datasets, conducting extensive ablations on drawn components and investigating the impact of auxiliary graph descriptions in the text prompt. Our results demonstrate that GoM consistently improves the zero-shot capability of MLMs in interpreting object positions and relative directions, improving base accuracy in visual question answering and localization up to 11 percentage points.

Graph-of-Mark: Promote Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models with Graph-Based Visual Prompting

Recent advances in LLM agentic systems have improved the automation of offensive security tasks, particularly for Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges. We systematically investigate the key factors that drive agent success and provide a detailed recipe for building effective LLM-based offensive security agents. First, we present CTFJudge, a framework leveraging LLMs as judges to analyze agent trajectories and provide granular evaluation across CTF solving steps. Second, we propose a novel metric, the CTF Competency Index (CCI), for partial correctness, revealing how closely agent solutions align with human-crafted gold standards. Third, we examine how LLM hyperparameters—namely temperature, top-p, and maximum token length—influence agent performance and automated cybersecurity task planning. For rapid evaluation, we present CTFTiny, a curated benchmark of 50 representative CTF challenges across binary exploitation, web, reverse engineering, forensics, and cryptography. Our findings identify optimal multi-agent coordination settings and lay the groundwork for future LLM agent research in cybersecurity.

Towards Effective Offensive Security LLM Agents: Hyperparameter Tuning, LLM as a Judge, and a Lightweight CTF Benchmark

We propose an efficient framework to compress massive video-frame features before feeding them into large multimodal models, thereby mitigating the severe token explosion arising from hour-long videos. Our design leverages a bidirectional state-space model equipped with a gated skip connection and a learnable weighted-average pooling mechanism applied to periodically inserted learned queries. This structure enables hierarchical downsampling across both spatial and temporal dimensions, preserving performance in a cost-effective manner. Across challenging hour-long video understanding tasks, our approach demonstrates competitive results against state-of-the-art models, while significantly reducing overall token budget. Notably, replacing our state-space model with conventional modules results in substantial performance degradation, highlighting the advantages of the proposed state-space modeling for effectively compressing multi-frame video information. Our framework emphasizes resource-conscious efficiency, making it practical for real-world deployments. We validate its scalability and generality across multiple benchmarks, achieving the dual objectives of efficient resource usage and comprehensive video understanding.

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DiffusionPose: Markov-Optimized Diffusion Model for Human Pose Estimation

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