Singapore

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model’s latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: (1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; (2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a +5\% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

AAAI 2026

Efficient Post-Training Refinement of Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

training-free refinement

latent reasoning

large language model

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

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn discriminative semantic invariance by contrasting different views of the same graph that share critical topological patterns.
However, existing GCL approaches with structural augmentations often struggle to identify task-relevant topological structures, let alone adapt to the varying coarse-to-fine topological granularities required across different downstream tasks.
To remedy this issue, we introduce Hierarchical Topological Granularity Graph Contrastive Learning (HTG-GCL), a novel framework that leverages transformations of the same graph to generate multi-scale ring-based cellular complexes, embodying the concept of topological granularity, thereby generating diverse topological views.
Recognizing that a certain granularity may contain misleading semantics, we propose a multi-granularity decoupled contrast and apply a granularity-specific weighting mechanism based on uncertainty estimation.
Comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HTG-GCL, highlighting its superior performance in capturing meaningful graph representations through hierarchical topological information.

HTG-GCL: Leveraging Hierarchical Topological Granularity from Cellular Complexes for Graph Contrastive Learning

Missing critical modalities in medical imaging poses significant challenges for AI-driven diagnostic systems, particularly in scenarios where limited modalities must suffice for downstream tasks. Existing approaches often fail to fully leverage privileged features available only at training or address the information gap between privileged and limited modalities, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a unified, dual-stage Disentanglement-AligNmenT framEwork (DANTE), which uses Information-Theoretic Regularization and Cross-Modal Reconstruction to decompose full-modality information into alignable and privileged-exclusive components. In the first stage, a self-supervised pre-training strategy based on cross-modal reconstruction acts as a proxy task to implicitly incentivize disentangled representations. In the second stage, we present an information-theoretic regularization to explicitly maximize the transfer of privileged knowledge through two novel modules: (1) a Mutual Alignment Module that employs multi-level bidirectional alignment between limited-modality features and alignable features, enhancing cross-modal representation consistency; (2) a Privileged Compaction Module that restricts the privileged-exclusive information flow, promoting the integration of task-relevant content into alignable representations. Experimental results on three challenging medical datasets demonstrate that DANTE achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging privileged guidance under modality scarcity, and exhibits broad applicability across diverse medical imaging scenarios.

Disentangling for Transfer: Boosting Limited Modalities via Information-Theoretic Regularization and Cross-Modal Reconstruction

Web automation uses intelligent agents to perform high-level tasks by mimicking human interactions with webpages. Despite recent advances in LLM-based web agents, efficiently navigating complex, real-world webpages remains challenging due to massive DOM structures (10,000$\sim$100,000 tokens). Current approaches either truncate DOMs—losing vital information—or use inefficient heuristics and separate ranking models, failing to balance precision and scalability. We introduce **Prune4Web**, a novel paradigm that transforms DOM processing from LLM-based filtering to programmatic pruning. Our key innovation is DOM Tree Pruning Programming, where an LLM generates executable Python scoring programs to dynamically filter DOM elements based on semantic clues from decomposed sub-tasks. This approach eliminates the need for LLMs to process full DOMs, instead delegating traversal and scoring to lightweight, interpretable programs. The result is a **25$\sim $50 times reduction** in candidate elements for grounding, enabling precise action localization without attention dilution. Additionally, we propose a data annotation method and a two-turn dialogue training strategy that jointly optimizes Planner, Programmatic Filter, and Grounder in a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. On our low-level task grounding task, our approach dramatically increases grounding accuracy from **46.8\% to 88.28\%**, highlighting its effectiveness.

Prune4Web: DOM Tree Pruning Programming for Web Agent

Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities and gained increasing popularity on social media platforms.
While LLM agents are reshaping the ecology of social media, there exists a current gap in conducting a comprehensive evaluation of their ability to comprehend media content, understand user behaviors, and make intricate decisions.
To address this challenge, we introduce SoMe, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate social media agents equipped with various agent tools for accessing and analyzing social media data.
SoMe comprises a diverse collection of 8 social media agent tasks, 9,164,284 posts, 6,591 user profiles, and 25,686 reports from various social media platforms and external websites, with 17,869 meticulously annotated task queries.
Compared with the existing datasets and benchmarks for social media tasks, SoMe is the first to provide a versatile and realistic platform for LLM-based social media agents to handle diverse social media tasks.
By extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we provide the first overview insight into the performance of mainstream agentic LLMs in realistic social media environments and identify several limitations.
Our evaluation reveals that both the current closed-source and open-source LLMs cannot handle social media agent tasks satisfactorily.
SoMe provides a challenging yet meaningful testbed for future social media agents.
Our code and data will be publicly available after acceptance.

SoMe: A Realistic Benchmark for LLM-based Social Media Agents

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in generative tasks, including audio super-resolution (SR). In many applications like movie post-production and album mastering, substantial computational budgets are available for achieving superior audio quality. However, while existing diffusion approaches typically increase sampling steps to improve quality, the performance remains fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of the sampling process, leading to high-variance and quality-limited outputs. Here, rather than simply increasing the number of sampling steps, we propose a different paradigm through inference-time scaling for SR, which explores multiple solution trajectories during the sampling process. Different task-specific verifiers are developed, and two search algorithms, including the random search and zero-order search for SR, are introduced. By actively guiding the exploration of the high-dimensional solution space through verifier-algorithm combinations, we enable more robust and higher-quality outputs. Through extensive validation across diverse audio domains (speech, music, sound effects) and frequency ranges, we demonstrate consistent performance gains, achieving improvements of up to 9.70% in aesthetics, 5.88% in speaker similarity, 15.20% in word error rate, and 46.98% in spectral distance for speech SR from 4 kHz to 24 kHz, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach.

Inference-time Scaling for Diffusion-based Audio Super-resolution

Modeling dynamic scenes through 4D Gaussians offers high visual fidelity and fast rendering speeds, but comes with significant storage overhead.
Recent approaches mitigate this cost by aggressively reducing the number of Gaussians.
However, this inevitably removes Gaussians essential for high-quality rendering, leading to severe degradation in dynamic regions.
In this paper, we introduce a novel 4D anchor-based framework that tackles the storage cost in different perspective.
Rather than reducing the number of Gaussians, our method retains a sufficient quantity to accurately model dynamic contents, while compressing them into compact, grid-aligned 4D anchor features.
Each anchor is processed by an MLP to spawn a set of neural 4D Gaussians, which represent a local spatiotemporal region.
We design these neural 4D Gaussians to capture temporal changes with minimal parameters, making them well-suited for the MLP-based spawning.
Moreover, we introduce a dynamic-aware anchor growing strategy to effectively assign additional anchors to under-reconstructed dynamic regions.
Our method adjusts the accumulated gradients with Gaussians' temporal coverage, significantly improving reconstruction quality in dynamic regions.
Experimental results highlight that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual quality in dynamic regions, outperforming all baselines by a large margin with practical storage costs.

4D Scaffold Gaussian Splatting with Dynamic-Aware Anchor Growing for Efficient and High-Fidelity Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Deep functional map frameworks (DFM) for shape correspondence are powerful, yet fundamentally limited by their reliance on end-to-end differentiability. This constraint prevents the integration of highly accurate, non-differentiable refinement techniques, capping their overall performance, especially on challenging non-isometric shapes. To overcome this, we introduce MDND, a novel DFM paradigm built on the principle of merging differentiable and non-differentiable components. Our framework facilitates unsupervised learning guided by an internal, non-differentiable refinement. Specifically, MDND employs a dual-branch architecture: a non-differentiable refinement branch leverages a novel, multiscale iterative solver to produce highly robust correspondences, acting as a refined target. Concurrently, a fully differentiable branch learns to predict correspondences from features. The entire system is trained end-to-end without supervision by enforcing a consistency loss that compels the differentiable branch to learn from the superior, refined results of the non-differentiable branch. Extensive experiments show that MDND sets a new state-of-the-art, demonstrating remarkable robustness on shapes with severe non-isometric deformations and topological noise.

MDND: Unsupervised Learning Guided by Non-Differentiable Refinement for Shape Correspondence

How can we accurately quantize a pre-trained Vision Transformer model?
Quantization algorithms compress Vision Transformers (ViTs) into low-bit formats, reducing memory and computation demands with minimal accuracy degradation.
However, existing methods rely on uniform precision, ignoring the diverse sensitivity of ViT components to quantization.
Metric-based Mixed Precision Quantization (MPQ) is a promising alternative, but previous MPQ methods for ViTs suffer from three major limitations: 1) coarse granularity, 2) mismatch in metric scale across component types, and 3) quantization-unaware bit allocation.
In this paper, we propose LampQ (Layer-wise Mixed Precision Quantization for Vision Transformers), an accurate
metric-based MPQ method for ViTs to overcome these limitations.
LampQ performs layer-wise quantization to achieve both fine-grained control and efficient acceleration, incorporating a type-aware Fisher-based metric to measure sensitivity.
Then, LampQ assigns bit-widths optimally through integer linear programming and further updates them iteratively.
Extensive experiments show that LampQ provides the state-of-the-art performance in quantizing ViTs pre-trained on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, and zero-shot quantization.

LampQ: Towards Accurate Layer-wise Mixed Precision Quantization for Vision Transformers

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in automating the design of agentic workflows. However, existing methods still rely heavily on manually predefined operators, limiting generalization and scalability. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{A\textsuperscript{2}Flow}, a fully automated framework for agentic workflow generation based on \textit{self-adaptive abstraction operators}. \textbf{A\textsuperscript{2}Flow} employs a three-stage operator extraction process: 1) Case-based Initial Operator Generation: leveraging expert demonstrations and LLM reasoning to generate case-specific operators; 2) Operator Clustering and Preliminary Abstraction: grouping similar operators across tasks to form preliminary abstractions; and 3) Deep Extraction for Abstract Execution Operators: applying long chain-of-thought prompting and multi-path reasoning to derive compact and generalizable execution operators. These operators serve as reusable building blocks for workflow construction without manual predefinition. Furthermore, we enhance node-level workflow search with an \textit{operator memory mechanism}, which retains historical outputs to enrich context and improve decision-making. Experiments on general and embodied benchmarks show that \textbf{A\textsuperscript{2}Flow} achieves a 2.4\% and 19.1\% average performance improvement and reduces resource usage by 37\% over state-of-the-art baselines.

A²Flow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation via Self-Adaptive Abstraction Operators

Recent visual generative models enable story generation with consistent characters from text, but human-centric story generation faces additional challenges, such as maintaining detailed and diverse human face consistency and coordinating multiple characters across different images. This paper presents IdentityStory, a framework for human-centric story generation that ensures consistent character identity across multiple sequential images. By taming identity-preserving generators, the framework features two key components: Iterative Identity Discovery, which extracts cohesive character identities, and Re-denoising Identity Injection, which re-denoises images to inject identities while preserving desired context. Experiments on the ConsiStory-Human benchmark demonstrate that IdentityStory outperforms existing methods, particularly in face consistency, and supports multi-character combinations. The framework also shows strong potential for applications such as infinite-length story generation and dynamic character composition. Code will be publicly available.

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HTG-GCL: Leveraging Hierarchical Topological Granularity from Cellular Complexes for Graph Contrastive Learning

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