Singapore

Incorporating explicit reasoning rules within the latent space of language models (LMs) offers a promising pathway to enhance generalisation, interpretability, and controllability. While current Transformer-based language models have shown strong performance on Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, they often rely on memorisation rather than explicit rule-based generalisation. This work investigates how human-interpretable reasoning rules can be explicitly encoded within
LMs with the support of Language Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), as a mechanism for generative control. We propose a complete pipeline for learning reasoning rules within Transformer-based language VAEs. This pipeline encompasses three rule-based reasoning tasks, a supporting theoretical framework, and a practical end-to-end architecture. The experiment illustrates the following findings: Disentangled reasoning: Under explicit signal supervision, reasoning rules (viewed as functional mappings) can be disentangled within the encoder’s parametric space. This separation results in distinct clustering of rules in the output feature space. Prior knowledge injection: injecting rule-based constraints into the Query enables the model to more effectively retrieve the stored Value from memory based on Key. This approach offers a simple method for integrating prior knowledge into decoder-only language models. Moreover, we found that FFN layers are better than attention layers at preserving the separation of reasoning rules in the model&#39;s parameters.

AAAI 2026

Learning to Disentangle Latent Reasoning Rules with Language VAEs: A Systematic Study

rule-based representation learning

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Incorporating explicit reasoning rules within the latent space of language models (LMs) offers a promising pathway to enhance generalisation, interpretability, and controllability. While current Transformer-based language models have shown strong performance on Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, they often rely on memorisation rather than explicit rule-based generalisation. This work investigates how human-interpretable reasoning rules can be explicitly encoded within
LMs with the support of Language Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), as a mechanism for generative control. We propose a complete pipeline for learning reasoning rules within Transformer-based language VAEs. This pipeline encompasses three rule-based reasoning tasks, a supporting theoretical framework, and a practical end-to-end architecture. The experiment illustrates the following findings: Disentangled reasoning: Under explicit signal supervision, reasoning rules (viewed as functional mappings) can be disentangled within the encoder’s parametric space. This separation results in distinct clustering of rules in the output feature space. Prior knowledge injection: injecting rule-based constraints into the Query enables the model to more effectively retrieve the stored Value from memory based on Key. This approach offers a simple method for integrating prior knowledge into decoder-only language models. Moreover, we found that FFN layers are better than attention layers at preserving the separation of reasoning rules in the model's parameters.

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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.

Visual grounding, the task of linking textual queries to specific regions within images, plays a pivotal role in vision-language integration. Existing methods typically rely on extensive task-specific annotations and fine-tuning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively to novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce GroundingAgent, a novel agentic visual grounding framework that operates without any task-specific fine-tuning. GroundingAgent employs a structured, iterative reasoning mechanism that integrates pretrained open-vocabulary object detectors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and large language models (LLMs) to progressively refine candidate regions through joint semantic and spatial analyses. Remarkably, GroundingAgent achieves an average zero-shot grounding accuracy of 65.1% on widely-used benchmarks (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg), entirely without fine-tuning. Furthermore, by substituting MLLM-generated captions with the original query texts, the accuracy at the selection stage alone reaches approximately 90%, closely matching supervised performance and underscoring the critical role of LLM reasoning capabilities. GroundingAgent also offers strong interpretability, transparently illustrating each reasoning step, thus providing clear insights into its decision-making process.

Connecting the Dots: Training-Free Visual Grounding via Agentic Reasoning

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements across various domains, and corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been continuously refined and improved. In this process, benchmarks in the scientific domain have played an important role in assessing the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks still face three key challenges: \textbf{1)} Insufficient evaluation of models' reasoning abilities in multilingual scenarios; \textbf{2)} Inadequate assessment of MLLMs' comprehensive modality coverage; \textbf{3)} Lack of fine-grained annotation of scientific knowledge points. To address these gaps, we propose MME-SCI, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark. We carefully collected 1,019 high-quality question-answer pairs, which involve 3 distinct evaluation modes. These pairs cover four subjects, namely mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, and support five languages: Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We conducted extensive experiments on 16 open-source models and 4 closed-source models, and the results demonstrate that MME-SCI is widely challenging for existing MLLMs. For instance, under the Image-only evaluation mode, o4-mini achieved accuracy of only 52.11\%, 24.73\%, 36.57\%, and 29.80\% in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, respectively, indicating a significantly higher difficulty level compared to existing benchmarks. More importantly, using MME-SCI's multilingual and fine-grained knowledge attributes, we analyzed existing models' performance in depth and identified their weaknesses in specific domains. For example, in questions related to ``Magnetic Field'', o4-mini correctly answered only 5 out of 33 questions, thereby fine-grainedly exposing the model's vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the urgent need to enhance the scientific reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Code and samples are available in the Supplementary Materials.

MME-SCI: A Comprehensive and Challenging Science Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimedia content offers additional context for recommender systems to better understand user interests. Existing studies on multimodal recommendation primarily focus on constructing item-item semantic graphs. However, most of these methods capture only shallow semantic structures based on feature similarity and struggle to model more complex or cross-entity semantic relationships (e.g., user-item). Moreover, in these methods, collaborative signals often dominate and suppress semantic knowledge, which limits its role in representation learning. To address these issues, we propose SCALE, a novel framework that combines $\underline{S}$ubspace-aware graph $\underline{C}$onstruction and contrastive $\underline{A}$lignment for multimoda$\underline{L}$ recommendation with large languag$\underline{E}$ models. Specifically, we first use large language models and encoders to extract user and item features. Following the subspace clustering assumption, we apply the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm to mine complex semantic structures within the item-item, user-user, and user-item spaces, and integrate them into a unified semantic graph. We then perform graph convolution on both the semantic and interaction graphs, and aggregate the results for recommendation. Furthermore, contrastive losses are employed to enhance semantic fusion and alignment. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SCALE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal recommendation models, highlighting its effectiveness in modeling complex relationships and integrating semantic knowledge with collaborative signals. The source code is provided in the supplementary material.

Subspace-Aware Graph Construction and Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation with Large Language Models

The deployment of pre-trained perception models in novel environments often leads to performance degradation due to distributional shifts. Although recent artificial intelligence approaches for metacognition use logical rules to characterize and filter model errors, improving precision often comes at the cost of reduced recall. This paper addresses the hypothesis that leveraging multiple pre-trained models can mitigate this recall reduction. We formulate the challenge of identifying and managing conflicting predictions from various models as a consistency-based abduction problem, building on the idea of abductive learning (ABL) but applying it to test-time instead of training. The input predictions and the learned error detection rules derived from each model are encoded in a logic program. We then seek an abductive explanation—a subset of model predictions—that maximizes prediction coverage while ensuring the rate of logical inconsistencies (derived from domain constraints) remains below a specified threshold. We propose two algorithms for this knowledge representation task: an exact method based on Integer Programming (IP) and an efficient Heuristic Search (HS). Through extensive experiments on a simulated aerial imagery dataset featuring controlled, complex distributional shifts, we demonstrate that our abduction-based framework outperforms individual models and standard ensemble baselines, achieving, for instance, average relative improvements of approximately 13.6% in F1-score and 16.6% in accuracy across 15 diverse test datasets when compared to the best individual model. Our results validate the use of consistency-based abduction as an effective mechanism to robustly integrate knowledge from multiple imperfect models in challenging, novel scenarios.

Consistency-based Abductive Reasoning over Perceptual Errors of Multiple Pre-trained Models in Novel Environments

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results in continuous control tasks, where efficient exploration of the state space is crucial for success. However, many recent RL approaches still struggle with sample inefficiency and insufficient exploration for long-horizon tasks, particularly in environments characterized by high-dimensional and complex state spaces.
To address these challenges, we propose a novel exploration framework, Latent State Predictive Exploration (LSPE). The core idea behind LSPE is to endow the agent with a form of ``foresight" to enhance exploration in long-horizon settings. Specifically, LSPE employs a state encoder to learn compact latent representations from high-dimensional visual observations, effectively filtering out irrelevant or noisy information. To further enrich and stabilize these representations, we incorporate a diffusion-based self-predictive module that enforces temporal consistency by predicting future states, thereby improving both exploration and downstream predictive control.
Additionally, we introduce an Exploration Reward Function (ERF) that explicitly encourages the agent to visit novel latent states. This reward signal promotes more efficient and scalable exploration in complex environments.
We evaluate LSPE across a diverse set of challenging long-horizon navigation and manipulation tasks, spanning simulation environments such as Habitat and Robosuite, as well as deployment on a real robot in a **physical indoor environment**. Experimental results show that LSPE substantially enhances exploration efficiency and scales effectively to complex, high-dimensional tasks.

Latent State-Predictive Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has established a new benchmark for high-precision image and video segmentation, offering significant potential for a wide range of computer vision tasks. Despite its impressive performance, the model's substantial computational and memory requirements present a significant obstacle to its practical deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for optimizing SAM2 through two synergistic, importance-driven strategies: quantization and memory management. Specifically, an Importance-driven Mixed-Precision Quantization scheme, which analyzes the sensitivity of each layer using a Weight-Activation Importance Score, is employed to enable a targeted bit-width assignment, preserving model accuracy by keeping critical layers at higher precision. Then, the Selective Importance-driven Synthesis (SIS) mechanism is proposed to address the inefficient accumulation of redundant data in the memory bank. SIS intelligently compresses the memory by identifying the most contextually similar historical frames and synthesizing them into a single, representative feature, thereby preserving informational diversity while enhancing temporal context understanding. Extensive experiments on the COCO and SA-V benchmarks validate our approach, showing that our optimized model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art quantization methods. Our work provides a principled framework for the co-design of quantization and dynamic memory management, offering a practical path toward deploying powerful video segmentation models in real-world applications.

Mix-QSAM2: Mixed-Precision Quantization for High Fidelity Segmentation in Resource Constrained Scenarios

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. While RGB-based methods have achieved strong performance with CNNs and Transformers, their effectiveness degrades under fast motion, low-light, or high dynamic range conditions due to limitations of frame cameras. Event cameras offer complementary advantages such as high temporal resolution and low latency, yet lack color and texture, making them insufficient on their own. To address this, recent research has explored multimodal fusion of RGB and event data; however, many existing approaches are computationally expensive and focus primarily on spatial fusion, neglecting the temporal dynamics inherent in event streams. In this work, we propose MambaSeg, a novel dual-branch semantic segmentation framework that employs parallel Mamba encoders to efficiently model RGB images and event streams. To reduce cross-modal ambiguity, we introduce the Dual-Dimensional Interaction Module (DDIM), comprising a Cross-Spatial Interaction Module (CSIM) and a Cross-Temporal Interaction Module (CTIM), which jointly perform fine-grained fusion along both spatial and temporal dimensions. This design improves cross-modal alignment, reduces ambiguity, and leverages the complementary properties of each modality. Extensive experiments on the DDD17 and DSEC datasets demonstrate that MambaSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing computational cost, showcasing its promise for efficient, scalable, and robust multimodal perception.

MambaSeg: Harnessing Mamba for Accurate and Efficient Image-Event Semantic Segmentation

Despite the rapid progress of deep learning in video action recognition (VAR) in recent years, privacy leakage in videos remains a critical concern. Current state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods often rely on anonymization. These methods suffer from (1) low concealment, where producing visually distorted videos that attract attackers’ attention during transmission, and (2) spatiotemporal disruption, where degrading essential spatiotemporal features for accurate VAR. To address these issues, we propose StegaVAR, a novel framework that embeds action videos into ordinary cover videos and directly performs VAR in the steganographic domain for the first time. Throughout both data transmission and action analysis, the spatiotemporal information of hidden secret video remains complete, while the natural appearance of cover videos ensures the concealment of transmission. Considering the difficulty of steganographic domain analysis, we propose Secret Spatio-Temporal Promotion (STeP) and Cross-Band Difference Attention (CroDA) for analysis within the steganographic domain. STeP uses the secret video to guide spatiotemporal feature extraction in the steganographic domain during training. CroDA suppresses cover interference by capturing cross-band semantic differences. Experiments demonstrate that StegaVAR achieves superior VAR and privacy-preserving performance on widely used datasets. Moreover, our framework is effective for multiple steganographic models. The codes will be released soon.

StegaVAR: Privacy-Preserving Video Action Recognition via Steganographic Domain Analysis

Multi-view 3D detection with bird’s eye view (BEV) is crucial for autonomous driving and robotics, but its robustness in real-world is limited as it struggles to predict accurate depth values. A mainstream solution, cross-modal distillation, transfers depth information from LiDAR to camera models but also unintentionally transfers depth-irrelevant information (e.g. LiDAR density). To mitigate this issue, we propose RayD3D, which transfers crucial depth knowledge along the ray: a line projecting from the camera to true location of an object. It is based on the fundamental imaging principle that predicted location of this object can only vary along this ray, which is finally determined by predicted depth value. Therefore, distilling along the ray enables more effective depth information transfer. More specifically, we design two ray-based distillation modules. Ray-based Contrastive Distillation (RCD) incorporates contrastive learning into distillation by sampling along the ray to learn how LiDAR accurately locates objects. Ray-based Weighted Distillation (RWD) adaptively adjusts distillation weight based on the ray to minimize the interference of depth-irrelevant information in LiDAR. For validation, we widely apply RayD3D into three representative types of BEV-based models, including BEVDet, BEVDepth4D, and BEVFormer. Our method is trained on clean NuScenes, and tested on both clean NuScenes and RoboBEV with a variety types of data corruptions. Our method significantly improves the robustness of all the three base models in all scenarios without increasing inference costs, and achieves the best when compared to recently released multi-view and distillation models.

RayD3D: Distilling Depth Knowledge Along the Ray for Robust Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Few-shot image classification (FSIC) aims to recognize novel categories from only a few labeled examples, making it inherently challenging under limited supervision. Existing approaches have attempted to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit semantics like class names or knowledge graphs to guide learning. However, such methods often encounter semantic ambiguity due to their dependence on either overly simplistic semantic priors or resource-intensive external knowledge sources, which limits their potential. In this paper, we explore the frequency domain as an implicit and task-adaptive source of semantic information. We propose F2SST, a Frequency-to-Spatial Semantic Transfer framework that enhances feature learning by leveraging spectral signals as hidden semantics. Specifically, F2SST applies Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract phase-invariant global frequency descriptors, followed by a lightweight Gated Spectral Attention (GSA) module that selectively emphasizes class-relevant frequency components. These enhanced spectral cues are then integrated into the spatial stream through a class-guided fusion mechanism, enabling more robust and semantically aligned representations. Extensive experiments on four standard benchmarks—miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and FC100—demonstrate that F2SST consistently improves performance, validating the effectiveness of frequency-domain semantics in FSIC.

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