Singapore

World models have been developed to support sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning agents. However, it remains challenging for world models to accurately replicate environments that are high-dimensional, non-stationary, and composed of multiple objects with rich interactions since most world models learn holistic representations of all environmental components. By contrast, humans perceive the environment by decomposing it into discrete objects, facilitating efficient decision-making. Motivated by this insight, we propose *Slot Transformer Imagination with CAusality-aware reinforcement learning* (STICA), a unified framework in which object-centric Transformers serve as the world model and causality-aware policy and value networks. STICA represents each observation as a set of object-centric tokens, together with tokens for the agent action and the resulting reward, enabling the world model to predict token-level dynamics and interactions. The policy and value networks then estimate token-level cause--effect relations and use them in the attention layers, yielding causality-guided decision-making. Experiments on object-rich benchmarks demonstrate that STICA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art agents in both sample efficiency and final performance.

AAAI 2026

Object-Centric World Models for Causality-Aware Reinforcement Learning

object-centric learning

world model

reinforcement learning

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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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.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit logically inconsistent hallucinations that appear coherent yet violate reasoning principles, with recent research suggesting an inverse relationship between causal reasoning capabilities and such hallucinations. However, existing reasoning approaches in LLMs, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its graph-based variants, operate at the linguistic token level rather than modeling the underlying causal relationships between variables, lacking the ability to represent conditional independencies or satisfy causal identification assumptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce causal-DAG construction and reasoning (CDCR-SFT), a supervised fine-tuning framework that trains LLMs to explicitly construct variable-level directed acyclic graph (DAG) and then perform reasoning over it. Moreover, we present a dataset comprising 25,368 samples (CausalDR), where each sample includes an input question, explicit causal DAG, graph-based reasoning trace, and validated answer. Experiments on four LLMs across eight tasks show that CDCR-SFT improves the causal reasoning capability with the state-of-the-art 95.33% accuracy on CLADDER (surpassing human performance of 94.8\% for the first time) and reduces the hallucination on HaluEval with 10% improvements. It demonstrates that explicit causal structure modeling in LLMs can effectively mitigate logical inconsistencies in LLM outputs. Code at https://github.com/MrLYG/CDCR-SFT.

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Causal Reasoning

Although Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are designed to capture multiple modes of a reward function, they often suffer from mode collapse in practice, getting trapped in early-discovered modes and requiring prolonged training to find diverse solutions. Existing exploration techniques often rely on heuristic novelty signals. We propose Loss-Guided GFlowNets (LGGFN), a novel approach where an auxiliary GFlowNet's exploration is directly driven by the main GFlowNet's training loss. By prioritizing trajectories where the main model exhibits high loss, LGGFN focuses sampling on poorly understood regions of the state space. This targeted exploration significantly accelerates the discovery of diverse, high-reward samples. Empirically, across diverse benchmarks including grid environments, structured sequence generation, Bayesian structure learning, and biological sequence design, LGGFN consistently outperforms baselines in exploration efficiency and sample diversity..For instance, on a challenging sequence generation task, it discovered over 40 times more unique valid modes while simultaneously reducing the exploration error metric by approximately 99\%.

Loss-Guided Auxiliary Agents for Overcoming Mode Collapse in GFlowNets

With the rapid rise of social media and Internet culture, memes have become a popular medium for expressing emotional tendencies. This has sparked growing interest in Meme Emotion Understanding (MEU), which aims to classify the emotional intent behind memes by leveraging their multimodal contents. While existing efforts have achieved promising results, two major challenges remain: (1) a lack of fine-grained multimodal fusion strategies, and (2) insufficient mining of memes’ implicit meanings and background knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose $\textit{MemoDetector}$, a novel framework for advancing MEU. First, we introduce a four-step textual enhancement module that utilizes the rich knowledge and reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to progressively infer and extract implicit and contextual insights from memes. These enhanced texts significantly enrich the original meme contents and provide valuable guidance for downstream classification. Next, we design a dual-stage modal fusion strategy: the first stage performs shallow fusion on raw meme image and text, while the second stage deeply integrates the enhanced visual and textual features. This hierarchical fusion enables the model to better capture nuanced cross-modal emotional cues. Experiments on two datasets, MET-MEME and MOOD, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, $\textit{MemoDetector}$ improves F1 scores by 4.3\% on MET-MEME and 3.4\% on MOOD. Further ablation studies and in-depth analyses validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, highlighting its strong potential for advancing MEU. Our code is available at https://github.com/singing-cat/MemoDetector.

Enhancing Meme Emotion Understanding with Multi-Level Modality Enhancement and Dual-Stage Modal Fusion

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models have achieved significant advancements. Correspondingly, many automated methods emerge to evaluate the image-text alignment capabilities of generative models. However, the performance comparison among these automated methods is constrained by the limited scale of existing datasets. Additionally, existing datasets lack the capacity to assess the performance of automated methods at a fine-grained level. In this study, we contribute an EvalMuse-40K dataset, gathering 40K image-text pairs with fine-grained human annotations for image-text alignment-related tasks. In the construction process, we employ various strategies such as balanced prompt sampling and data re-annotation to ensure the diversity and reliability of our dataset. This allows us to comprehensively evaluate the performance of image-text alignment methods for T2I models. Based on this dataset, we introduce an efficient automated evaluation method termed FGA-BLIP2, which enables Fine-Grained Alignment evaluation solely by inputting images and text leveraging BLIP2, without visual question answering for each fine-grained element. Experimental results show the proposed FGA-BLIP2 efficiently achieves good performance on multiple image-text alignment datasets. Meanwhile, benefiting from the high efficiency and fine-grained evaluation capability of FGA-BLIP2, we apply it as a reward model to improve text-to-image models, which effectively enhances the image-text alignment ability of text-to-image models.

EvalMuse-40K: A Fine-Grained Benchmark with Comprehensive Human Annotations for Text-to-Image Generation Model Alignment Evaluation

Log parsing converts semi-structured logs into structured templates, forming a critical foundation for downstream analysis. Traditional syntax and semantic-based parsers often struggle with semantic variations in evolving logs and data scarcity stemming from their limited domain coverage. Recent large language model (LLM)-based parsers leverage in-context learning (ICL) to extract semantics from examples, demonstrating superior accuracy. However, LLM-based parsers face two main challenges: 1) underutilization of ICL capabilities, particularly in dynamic example selection and cross-domain generalization, leading to inconsistent performance; 2) time-consuming and costly LLM querying. To address these challenges, we present MicLog, the first progressive meta in-context learning (ProgMeta-ICL) log parsing framework that combines meta-learning with ICL on small open-source LLMs (i.e., Qwen-2.5-3B). Specifically, MicLog: i) enhances LLMs' ICL capability through a zero-shot to k-shot ProgMeta-ICL paradigm, employing weighted DBSCAN candidate sampling and enhanced BM25 demonstration selection; ii) accelerates parsing via a multi-level pre-query cache that dynamically matches and refines recently parsed templates. Evaluated on Loghub-2.0, MicLog achieves 10.3\% higher parsing accuracy than the state-of-the-art parser while reducing parsing time by 42.4\%.

MicLog: Towards Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Log Parsing via Progressive Meta In-Context Learning

Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generative models has led to significant improvements in generating high-quality images aligned with text prompts. However, these models still struggle with prompts involving multiple objects, often resulting in object neglect or object mixing. Through extensive studies, we identify four problematic scenarios, Similar Shapes, Similar Textures, Dissimilar Background Biases, and Many Objects, where inter-object relationships frequently lead to such failures. Motivated by two key observations about CLIP embeddings, we propose DOS (Directional Object Separation), a method that modifies three types of CLIP text embeddings before passing them into text-to-image models. Experimental results show that DOS consistently improves the success rate of multi-object image generation and reduces object mixing. In human evaluations, DOS significantly outperforms four competing methods, receiving 26.24%-43.04% more votes across four benchmarks. These results highlight DOS as a practical and effective solution for improving multi-object image generation.

DOS: Directional Object Separation in Text Embeddings for Multi-Object Image Generation

We propose BRIC, a novel test-time adaptation (TTA) framework that enables long-term human motion generation by resolving execution discrepancies between diffusion-based kinematic motion planners and reinforcement learning-based physics controllers. While diffusion models can generate diverse and expressive motions conditioned on text and scene context, they often produce physically implausible outputs, leading to execution drift during simulation. To address this, BRIC dynamically adapts the physics controller to noisy motion plans at test time, while preserving pre-trained skills via a loss function that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. In addition, BRIC introduces a lightweight test-time guidance mechanism that steers the diffusion model in the signal space without updating its parameters.
By combining both adaptation strategies, BRIC ensures consistent and physically plausible long-term executions across diverse environments in an effective and efficient manner. We validate the effectiveness of BRIC on a variety of long-term tasks, including motion composition, obstacle avoidance, and human-scene interaction, achieving state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.

BRIC: Bridging Kinematic Plans and Physical Control at Test Time

Accurate air quality forecasting is essential for public health and environmental sustainability, but remains challenging due to the complex pollutant dynamics.
Existing deep learning methods often model pollutant dynamics as an instantaneous process, overlooking the intrinsic delays in pollutant propagation. 
Thus, we propose AirDDE, the first neural delay differential equation framework in this task that integrates delay modeling into a continuous-time pollutant evolution under physical guidance.
Specifically, two novel components are introduced: (1) a memory-augmented attention module that retrieves globally and locally historical multimo features, which can adaptively capture delay effects modulated by multifactor data; and (2) a physics-guided delay evolving function, grounded in the continuity equation, that models diffusion, delayed advection, and source/sink terms, which can capture delay-aware pollutant accumulation patterns with physical plausibility. 
Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AirDDE achieves the state-of-the-art forecasting performance with an average MAE reduction of 8.81\% over the best baselines.

AirDDE: Multifactor Neural Delay Differential Equations for Air Quality Forecasting

The booming remote sensing (RS) technology is giving rise to a novel multimodality generalization task, which requires the model to overcome data heterogeneity while possessing powerful cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, most vision-language models (VLMs) usually describe surface materials in RS images using universal texts, lacking proprietary linguistic prior knowledge specific to different RS vision modalities. In this work, we formalize RS multimodality generalization (RSMG) as a learning paradigm, and propose a frequency-aware vision-language multimodality generalization network (FVMGN) for RS image classification. Specifically, a diffusion-based training-test-time augmentation (DTAug) strategy is designed to reconstruct multimodal land-cover distributions, enriching input information for FVMGN. Following that, to overcome multimodal heterogeneity, a multimodal wavelet disentanglement (MWDis) module is developed to learn cross-domain invariant features by resampling low and high frequency components in the frequency domain. Considering the characteristics of RS vision modalities, shared and proprietary class texts is designed as linguistic inputs for the transformer-based text encoder to extract diverse text features. For multimodal vision inputs, a spatial-frequency-aware image encoder (SFIE) is constructed to realize local-global feature reconstruction and representation. Finally, a multiscale spatial-frequency feature alignment (MSFFA) module is suggested to construct a unified semantic space, ensuring refined multiscale alignment of different text and vision features in spatial and frequency domains. Extensive experiments show that FVMGN has the excellent multimodality generalization ability compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Frequency-Aware Vision-Language Multimodality Generalization Network for Remote Sensing Image Classification

The response behaviors observed in online user-generated content (UGC) frequently demonstrate non-linear characteristics, such as conditional branching and selective avoidance. These patterns present additional challenges for ensuring the trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning, particularly as their unidirectional, left-to-right inference mechanisms may not adequately capture such complex reasoning dynamics. To address this, we propose a Forest of Thought Explanation (FoTE), a novel prompting that models the selective avoidance in UGC while ensuring explanation consensus through reasoning paths across all decision sub-trees. The FoTE employs an Iterative Chain of Thought (ICoT) to generate diverse reasoning thoughts. The thoughts are then assessed via a cooperative contribution evaluator with a fair contribution. The top-$k$ highest-contribution thoughts are retained for subsequent reasoning iterations, while subsets are randomly sampled to simulate selective avoidance—thereby constructing the FoTE. Through extensive evaluations across three open-source LLMs and two established social science problems (spanning four benchmark datasets), the FoTE demonstrates superior success rates compared to competing prompting strategies. Notably, its performance gains increase with the strength of selective avoidance in social problems. The trustworthiness of our FoTE is enhanced by the incorporation of (1) a cooperative game theory-based thought evaluator and (2) a transparent reasoning path that converges toward consensus.

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