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Universal graph pre-training has emerged as a key paradigm in graph representation learning, offering a promising way to train encoders to learn transferable representations from unlabeled graphs and to effectively generalize across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, recent explorations in universal graph pre-training primarily focus on homogeneous graphs and it remains unexplored for heterogeneous graphs, which exhibit greater structural and semantic complexity. This heterogeneity makes it highly challenging to train a universal encoder for diverse heterogeneous graphs: (i) the diverse types with dataset-specific semantics hinder the construction of a unified representation space; (ii) the number and semantics of meta-paths vary across datasets, making encoding and aggregation patterns learned from one dataset difficult to apply to others. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Meta-path-aware Universal heterogeneous Graph pre-training (MUG) approach. Specifically, for challenge (i), MUG introduces a input unification module to bridge heterogeneous types by enriching original attributes with contextual structure information and aligning them within a unified representation space. Furthermore, for challenge (ii), MUG combines meta-path reconstruction with global scattering objective, enabling a shared encoder to capture transferable high-order relational patterns while mitigating dataset-specific biases.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MUG on some real datasets.

AAAI 2026

MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training

heterogeneous graph representation learning

graph pre-training

self-supervised learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

technical paper

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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.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a challenging task in person search. It adapts a well-trained model from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain for privacy and efficiency. Currently, most of the state-of-the-art UDA person search methods adopt multi-scale feature alignment techniques to learn domain-invariant representations. However, person search is a multi-granularity task, and such an indiscriminate method of bridging the differences between domains misleads the identity learning process, which significantly limits the model's performance. In this paper, we propose an Instance-Guided Scene Adaptation (IGSA) framework by eradicating scene disparities and focusing the tasks on instances, effectively eliminating the contradiction between person search and domain adaptation. In IGSA, a Scene-Aware Bidirectional Filter (SABF) is desgned to divide the image features into background and foreground to perform bidirectional modulations, thereby achieving simultaneous scene elimination and instance enhancement. To further improve the reliability of identity learning, we also propose an Instance Refinement Consistency Contrastive Learning (IRCCL) method. By performing cross-epoch updates on the instance-level memory bank and re-initializing the cluster-level memory bank, the problem of inconsistent training across epochs caused by instance identity drift can be alleviated. Through the above designs, our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets, with 82.1\% mAP and 83.8\% top-1 on the CUHK-SYSU dataset, 41.1\% mAP and 82.3\% top-1 on the PRW dataset, which is even better than some supervised methods.

Instance-Guided Scene Adaptation for Unsupervised Person Search

Adapting Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to real-world scenarios poses the dual challenges of learning from sequential data streams while handling frequent modality incompleteness, a task known as Continual Missing Modality Learning (CMML). However, existing works on CMML have predominantly relied on prompt tuning, a technique that struggles with this task due to cross-task interference between its learnable prompts in their shared embedding space. A naive application of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with modality-shared module will also suffer modality interference from competing gradients. To this end, we propose DeLo, the first framework to leverage a novel dual-decomposed low-rank expert architecture for CMML. Specifically, this architecture resolves modality interference
through decomposed LoRA expert, dynamically composing LoRA updates matrix with rank-one factors from disentangled modality-specific factor pools. Embedded within a task-partitioned framework that structurally prevents catastrophic forgetting, this expert system is supported by two key mechanisms: a Cross-Modal Guided Routing strategy to handle incomplete data and a Task-Key Memory for efficient, task-agnostic inference. Extensive experiments on established CMML benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. This highlights the value of a principled, architecturally-aware LoRA design for real-world multimodal challenges.

DeLo: Dual Decomposed Low-Rank Experts Collaboration for Continual Missing Modality Learning

Neurosymbolic (NeSy) AI aims to combine the strengths of neural architectures and symbolic reasoning to improve the accuracy, interpretability, and generalization capability of AI models. While logic inference on top of subsymbolic modules has been shown to effectively guarantee these properties, this often comes at the cost of reduced scalability, which can severely limit the usability of NeSy models. 
This paper introduces DeepProofLog (DPrL), a novel NeSy system based on stochastic logic programs, which addresses the scalability limitations of previous methods. DPrL parameterizes all derivation steps with neural networks, allowing efficient neural guidance over the proving system. Additionally, we establish a formal mapping between the resolution process of our deep stochastic logic programs and Markov Decision Processes, enabling the application of dynamic programming and reinforcement learning techniques for efficient inference and learning. This theoretical connection improves scalability for complex proof spaces and large knowledge bases. Our experiments on standard NeSy benchmarks and knowledge graph reasoning tasks demonstrate that DPrL outperforms existing state-of-the-art NeSy systems, advancing scalability to larger and more complex settings than previously possible.

DeepProofLog: Efficient Proving in Deep Stochastic Logic Programs

Current text-to-image models face challenges in visual text rendering: text encoders like CLIP and T5 lack glyph-level understanding and often struggle to distinguish between the specific words to be rendered and their intended semantic meaning within prompts. In addition, inconsistencies between the base model and its plugins further compromise the quality of synthesized images. In this paper, we enhance the existing text-to-image method by addressing the following aspects: (1) Text-Glyph Alignmentin a Visual Question Answering (VQA) manner to enable glyph understanding for the text encoder. This involves establishing an explicit alignment between the representations of the glyphs and their detailed attribute descriptions, which boosts the model's ability to capture fine-grained visual features of the text.
(2) Accurate and harmony visual text rendering: integrating pre-aligned glyph-visual embeddings with semantic text tokens through the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer(MMDiT) synchronously, ensuring coherent feature alignment and enhancing both the robustness and fidelity of visual text rendering. (3) Image Aesthetic Refinement: leveraging a multisource data training strategy that incorporates diverse, high-quality image-text pairs from various domains, exposing the model to extensive linguistic and visual diversity while maintaining superior aesthetic quality throughout training. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art method.

ViType: High-Fidelity Visual Text Rendering via Glyph-Aware Multimodal Diffusion

Federated clustering addresses the critical challenge of extracting patterns from decentralized, unlabeled data but is hampered by the flaw that these approaches force an unacceptable compromise between performance and privacy: \textit{transmitting rich representations like embeddings risks sensitive data leakage, while sharing only abstract cluster prototypes leads to diminished model accuracy}. To resolve this dilemma, we propose Structural Privacy-Preserving Federated Graph Clustering (SPP-FGC), a novel algorithm that innovatively leverages local structural graphs as the primary medium for privacy-preserving knowledge sharing, thus moving beyond the limitations of conventional techniques. Our framework operates on a clear client-server logic; on the client-side, each participant constructs a private structural graph that captures intrinsic data relationships, which the server then securely aggregates and aligns to form a comprehensive global graph from which a unified clustering structure is derived. The framework offers two distinct modes to suit different needs. SPP-FGC is designed as an efficient one-shot method that completes its task in a single communication round, ideal for rapid analysis. For more complex, unstructured data like images, SPP-FGC+ employs an iterative process where clients and the server collaboratively refine feature representations to achieve superior downstream performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving clustering accuracy by up to 10\% (NMI) over federated baselines while maintaining provable privacy guarantees. The code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPPFGC-B47EA310/.

Towards Federated Clustering: A Client-wise Private Graph Aggregation Framework

Can we train a 3D molecule generator using data from dense regions to generate samples in sparse regions? This challenge can be framed as an out-of-distribution (OOD) generation problem. While prior research on OOD generation predominantly targets property shifts, structural shifts, such as differences in molecular scaffolds or functional groups, represent an equally critical source of distributional shifts. This work introduces the Geometric OOD Diffusion Model (_GOOD_), a novel diffusion-based framework that enables training on data-abundant molecular distributions while generalizing to data-scarce distributions under distributional structural shifts. Central to our approach is a designated equivariant asymmetric autoencoder to capture distributional structural priors. The asymmetric design allows the model to generalize to unseen structural variations by capturing distributional priors representing distinct distributions. The encoded structural-grained priors guide generation toward sparse regions without requiring explicit training on such data. Evaluated across standard benchmarks encompassing OOD structural shifts (e.g., scaffolds, rings), GOOD achieves an improvement of 12.6% in success rate, defined based on molecular validity, uniqueness, and novelty. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates promising performance and generalization on canonical fragment-based drug design tasks, highlighting its utility in learning-based molecular discovery.

Distributional Priors Guided Diffusion for Generating 3D Molecules in Low Data Regimes

A taxonomy is a hierarchical graph containing knowledge to provide valuable insights for various web applications. However, the manual construction of taxonomies requires significant human effort. As web content continues to expand at an unprecedented pace, existing taxonomies risk becoming outdated, struggling to incorporate new and emerging information effectively. As a consequence, there is a growing need for dynamic taxonomy expansion to keep them relevant and up-to-date. Existing taxonomy expansion methods often rely on classical word embeddings to represent entities. However, these embeddings fall short of capturing hierarchical polysemy, where an entity’s meaning can vary based on its position in the hierarchy and its surrounding context. To address this challenge, we introduce QuanTaxo, an innovative quantum-inspired framework for taxonomy expansion. QuanTaxo encodes entity representations in quantum space, effectively modeling hierarchical polysemy by leveraging the principles of Hilbert space to capture interference effects between entities, yielding richer and more nuanced representations. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world benchmark datasets show that QuanTaxo significantly outperforms classical embedding models, achieving substantial improvements of 12.3% in accuracy, 11.2% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and 6.9% in Wu \& Palmer (Wu\&P) metrics across ten classical embedding-based baselines.

QuanTaxo: A Quantum Approach to Self-Supervised Taxonomy Expansion

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly used to simulate human interactions and solve collaborative tasks. A common practice is to assign agents with personas to encourage behavioral diversity. However, this raises a critical yet underexplored question: do personas introduce biases into multi-agent interactions? This paper presents a systematic investigation into persona-induced biases in multi-agent interactions, with a focus on social traits like trustworthiness (how an agent's opinion is received by others) and insistence (how strongly an agent advocates for its opinion). Through a series of controlled experiments in collaborative problem-solving and persuasion tasks, we reveal that (1) LLM-based agents exhibit biases in both trustworthiness and insistence, with personas from historically advantaged groups (e.g., men and White individuals) perceived as less trustworthy and demonstrating less insistence; and (2) agents exhibit significant in-group favoritism, showing a higher tendency to conform to others who share the same persona. These biases persist across various LLMs, group sizes, and numbers of interaction rounds, highlighting an urgent need for awareness and mitigation to ensure the fairness and reliability of multi-agent systems.

From Single to Societal: Analyzing Persona-Induced Bias in Multi-Agent Interactions

We introduce a conceptual framework and provide considerations for the institutional design of AI incident reporting (IR) systems, i.e., processes for collecting information about safety- and rights-related events caused by general-purpose AI. As general-purpose AI systems are increasingly adopted, they are causing more real-world harms and displaying the potential to cause significantly more dangerous incidents—events that did or could have caused harm to individuals, property, or the environment. Through a literature review, we develop a framework for understanding the institutional design of AI incident reporting systems, which includes seven dimensions: policy goal, actors submitting and receiving reports, type of incidents reported, level of risk materialization, enforcement of reporting, anonymity of reporters, and post-reporting actions. We then examine nine case studies of incident reporting in safety-critical industries to extract design considerations for AI incident reporting in the United States. We discuss, among other factors, differences in systems operated by regulatory vs. non-regulatory government agencies, near miss reporting, the roles of mandatory reporting thresholds and voluntary reporting channels, how to enable safety learning after reporting, sharing incident information, and clarifying legal frameworks for reporting. Our aim is to inform researchers and policymakers about when particular design choices might be more or less appropriate for AI incident reporting.

Designing Incident Reporting Systems for Harms from General-Purpose AI

There is increasing interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and support complex decision-making tasks. However, it remains unclear how algorithms compare to human judgment in contexts requiring semantic understanding and domain expertise. We examine this in the context of the judge assignment problem --- matching submissions to suitably qualified evaluators --- at a prominent U.S. university startup competition. Awarding over $\textdollar$500,000 annually, this is a real-world setting where high-quality judge assignment is critical. We develop and deploy HLSE (Hybrid Lexical–Semantic Similarity Ensemble), an AI-based approach, at the competition and compare algorithmic against human expert assignments by collecting blinded match quality scores from judges for $309$ judge-venture matches. Using a Mann–Whitney U statistic based test, we found no statistically significant difference in assignment quality between the two approaches ($AUC=0.48, p=0.40$). On average, algorithmic matches are rated $3.90$ and manual matches are rated $3.94$ on a $5$-point scale, where $5$ indicates an excellent match. Furthermore, manual assignments that took a full week in past years can be completed in under ten minutes by the algorithm during deployment. These results demonstrate that HLSE achieves human expert level matching quality while offering greater scalability and efficiency, underscoring the potential of AI-driven solutions to robustly support and enhance human decision-making for judge assignment in high-stakes settings.

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