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Linear models are widely used in high-stakes decision-making due to their simplicity and interpretability. Yet when fairness constraints such as demographic parity are introduced, their effects on model coefficients, and thus on how predictive bias is distributed across features, remain opaque. Existing approaches on linear models often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions, or overlook the explicit role of the sensitive attribute, limiting their practical utility for fairness assessment.
We extend the work of Chzhen and Schreuder (2022) and Fukuchi and Sakuma (2023) by proposing a post-processing framework that can be applied on top of any linear model to decompose the resulting bias into direct (sensitive-attribute) and indirect (correlated-features) components. Our method analytically characterizes how demographic parity reshapes each model coefficient, including those of both sensitive and non-sensitive features. This enables a transparent, feature-level interpretation of fairness interventions and reveals how bias may persist or shift through correlated variables.
Our framework requires no model retraining and provides actionable insights for model auditing and mitigation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method captures fairness dynamics missed by prior work, offering a practical and interpretable tool for responsible deployment of linear models.

AAAI 2026

Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models Under Demographic Parity Constraint

linear models

indirect bias

fairness

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.

technical paper

This work presented a web-based system which introduces an active-listening strategy in a spoken dialogue for self-disclosure to support mental health of a campus user. To enhance the system usability and safety, this demo is developed to conduct the bilingual (Mandarin/English) spoken dialogue where a high-risk dialogue detection during speech interaction is reliably augmented. In particular, a prompt-driven GPT classifier identifies the utterances indicating self-harm or suicide intent and triggers safety alerts with help center and counselor notification. We also integrate a TTS module for Taiwanese Mandarin and standard English, and redesign the user interface to automatically pop up alert messages when high-risk dialogue is detected. In addition, we collect speech data under diverse mental dialogue scenarios with bilingual speech to enable system analysis, evaluation and refinement. Overall, these extensions build a framework that promotes empathetic interactions, enables timely alert in critical cases, and improves the accessibility for diverse users.

Risk-Aware Bilingual Spoken Dialogue for Campus Mental Health Support

Scientific research articles, typically distributed in PDF format, contain valuable knowledge but remain challenging to convert into structured datasets due to fragmented workflows that separate parsing, annotation, and visualization. Existing annotation platforms operate on plain text, which requires an additional PDF-to-text conversion step before annotation, while PDF parsing tools lack automated annotation suggestions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Docora, a system that unifies PDF parsing, automated annotation assistance, and multi-view visualization into a single interactive platform. Docora enables researchers to configure entity and relation schemas for any domain, automatically generates initial annotations using rule-based, model-based, or LLM-based extractors, and provides synchronized visualizations across PDF, text, and graph views. Users can refine annotations directly on the PDF canvas, ensuring consistency between document layout and structured representations. The system’s source code is publicly available to facilitate further research and development.

Docora: A System for Interactive Knowledge Extraction and Visualization from Scientific PDFs

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval---the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm---should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5-18 F₁), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 pp and cuts misleading-context overrides by -29.3 pp, while adding only 0.3 % parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

Seeing through the Conﬂict: Transparent Knowledge Conﬂict Handling in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Leveraging social homophily to enhance user preference modeling, social recommendation has become a cornerstone of modern recommender systems. However, the raw social network contains inherent unreliability as it teems with noise---misclicks, bot-generated and transient ties---while many meaningful links remain unobserved. In this study, we propose DRSoRec, a dual-rectification model to rectify the raw social networks by simultaneously removing noisy signals and preserving useful information. Specifically, the invariant social rationale discovery module distills each user's influential core social circle of the current recommendation, whereas the adaptive social connection refinement module employs a mixture-of-experts structure learner to prune spurious edges and uncover latent links. A contrastive optimization objective is designed to align and mutually enhance these two modules, and the refined user representations are fused with collaborative representations generated from interactions for the final recommendation. Experiments on three public datasets confirm that DRSoRec consistently gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

DRSoRec: Dual-Rectification of Social Networks for Recommendation

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) seeks to decode human emotions by integrating heterogeneous modalities. However, real-world scenarios often involve missing or misaligned data due to sensor failures or transmission errors, leading to disrupted temporal dynamics and degraded cross-modal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose RECAP (Recovery of Coherent Affective Patterns), a robust two-stage framework to restore temporal and structural emotional integrity under modality incompleteness. The first stage employs a causality-aware adversarial generator for multi-granularity temporal reconstruction, complemented by a contrastive mutual information factorization module that disentangles shared and modality-specific semantics. The second stage introduces a mutual information-guided attention fusion mechanism with a ranking-based objective, enabling adaptive integration of complementary signals for refined prediction. Extensive experiments on MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS under various missing-modality conditions demonstrate that RECAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it achieves gains of +2.71\% in Acc-7 on MOSI, and +4.05\% in Acc-3 and +6.38\% in F1 on SIMS. These results verify the performance of RECAP in terms of capturing fine-grained emotional cues and robustness.

Recovering Coherent Affective Patterns: Addressing Modality Missing in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Consensus decision-making uses crowd responses (usually non-experts) to questions to reach a consensus answer based on human-machine collaboration. The crucial point is dynamic, which should not only enable rapid self-iteration toward the correct answer through crowd workers' responses but also adaptively suggest the next most valuable question(s) to speed up the answer integration. However, existing methods reach consensus answers based on either offline data or fixed search structures of questions, where the dynamic nature is largely left aside. In response, we propose a bilevel optimization-based human-machine collaboration (BiO-HMC), which explores an *inner* \& *outer-level* optimization to enable effective answer integration and efficient question selection. The resulting optimization problem is intractable because there is no closed form expression in the *inner-level* optimization. We employ a gradient-based method and guarantee the method's theoretical convergence. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the BiO-HMC model, i.e., achieving the highest confidence in the correct answer with the lowest labor cost.

BiO-HMC: Dynamic Human-Machine Collaboration for Consensus Decision-Making via Bilevel Optimization

The restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) framework is a popular model with applications across a wide variety of fields. However, its solution is hindered by the exponentially growing state space (with respect to the number of arms) and the combinatorial action space, making traditional reinforcement learning methods infeasible for large-scale instances. In this paper, we propose GINO-Q, a three-timescale stochastic approximation algorithm designed to learn an asymptotically optimal index policy for RMABs. GINO-Q mitigates the curse of dimensionality by decomposing the RMAB into a series of subproblems, each with the same dimension as a single arm, ensuring that complexity increases linearly with the number of arms. Unlike recently developed Whittle-index-based algorithms, GINO-Q does not require RMABs to be indexable, enhancing its flexibility and applicability. Our experimental results demonstrate that GINO-Q consistently learns near-optimal policies, even for non-indexable RMABs where Whittle-index-based algorithms perform poorly, and it converges significantly faster than existing baselines.

GINO-Q: Learning an Asymptotically Optimal Index Policy for Restless Multi-armed Bandits

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that bypass safety guidelines and generate harmful content. Mitigating these vulnerabilities requires defense mechanisms that are both robust and computationally efficient. However, existing approaches either incur high computational costs or rely on lightweight defenses that can be easily circumvented, rendering them impractical for real-world LLM-based systems. In this work, we introduce the AlignTree defense, which enhances model alignment while maintaining minimal computational overhead. AlignTree monitors LLM activations during generation and detects misaligned behavior using an efficient random forest classifier. This classifier operates on two signals: (i) the refusal direction - a linear representation that activates on misaligned prompts, and (ii) an SVM-based signal that captures non-linear features associated with harmful content. Unlike previous methods, AlignTree does not require additional prompts or auxiliary guard models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of AlignTree across multiple LLMs and benchmarks.

AlignTree: Efficient Defense Against LLM Jailbreak Attacks

Humanoid robots are expected to operate reliably over long horizons while executing versatile whole-body skills.
Yet Reinforcement Learning (RL) motion policies typically lose stability under prolonged operation, sensor/actuator noise, and real world disturbances.
In this work, we propose a Selective Adversarial Attack for Robust Training (SA2RT) to enhance the robustness of motion skills.
The adversary is learned to identify and sparsely perturb the most vulnerable states and actions under an attack-budget constraint, thereby exposing true weakness without inducing conservative overfitting.
The resulting non-zero sum, alternating optimization continually strengthens the motion policy against the strongest discovered attacks.
We validate our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot across perceptive locomotion and whole-body control tasks.
Experimental results show that adversarially trained policies improve the terrain traversal success rate by 40\%, reduce the trajectory tracking error by 32\%, and maintain long horizon mobility and tracking performance.
Together, these results demonstrate that selective adversarial attacks are an effective driver for learning robust, long horizon humanoid motion skills.

Keep On Going: Learning Robust Humanoid Motion Skills via Selective Adversarial Training

In this paper, we describe and benchmark a competitor-discovery component, an essential part of an agentic AI system for fast drug asset due diligence. A competitor-discovery AI agent, given an indication, retrieves all drugs comprising the competitive landscape of that indication and extracts canonical attributes for these drugs. The competitor definition is investor-specific, and data is paywalled/licensed, fragmented across registries, ontology-mismatched by indication, alias-heavy for drug names, multimodal, and rapidly changing. Although considered the best tool for this problem, the current LLM-based AI systems aren’t capable of reliably retrieving all competing drug names, and there is no accepted public benchmark for this task. To address the lack of evaluation, we use LLM-based agents to transform five years of multi-modal, unstructured due diligence memos from a private biotech VC fund into a structured evaluation corpus mapping indications to competitor drugs with normalized attributes. We also introduce a competitor validating LLM-as-a-judge agent that filters out false positives from the list of predicted competitors to maximize precision and suppress hallucinations. On our benchmark, our competitor-discovery agent achieves 83\% recall, exceeding OpenAI Deep Research (65\%) and Perplexity Labs (60\%). The system is deployed in production with enterprise users; in a case study with a biotech VC investment-fund, analyst turnaround time dropped from 2.5 days to $\sim$3 hours ($\sim$20x) for the competitive analysis.

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Risk-Aware Bilingual Spoken Dialogue for Campus Mental Health Support

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Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models Under Demographic Parity Constraint (Student Abstract)

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