Singapore

We study a matrix completion problem where both the ground truth $R$ matrix and the unknown sampling distribution $P$ over observed entries are low-rank matrices, and *share a common subspace*. We assume that a large amount $M$ of unlabeled data drawn from the sampling distribution $P$ is available, together with a small amount $N$ of &quot;labeled&quot; data drawn from the same distribution and noisy estimates of the corresponding ground truth entries. This setting is inspired by recommender systems scenarios where the unlabeled data corresponds to &quot;implicit feedback&quot; (consisting in interactions such as purchase, click, etc. ) and the labeled data corresponds to the `explicit feedback&#39;, consisting of interactions where the user has given an explicit rating to the item. Leveraging powerful results from the theory of low-rank subspace recovery, together with classic generalization bounds for matrix completion models, we show error bounds consisting of a sum of two error terms scaling as $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{nd}{M}}\right)$ and $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{dr}{N}}\right)$ respectively, where $d$ is the rank of $P$ and $r$ is the rank of $M$. In synthetic experiments, we confirm that the true generalization error naturally splits into independent error terms corresponding to the estimations of $P$ and and the ground truth matrix $G$ respectively. In real-life experiments on Douban and MovieLens with most explicit ratings removed, we demonstrate that the method can outperform baselines relying only on the explicit ratings, demonstrating that our assumptions provide a valid toy theoretical setting to study the interaction between explicit and implicit feedbacks in recommender systems.

AAAI 2026

Generalization Bounds for Semi-supervised Matrix Completion with Distributional Side Information

semi-superised

matrix completion

recommendation systems

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

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.

We study a matrix completion problem where both the ground truth $R$ matrix and the unknown sampling distribution $P$ over observed entries are low-rank matrices, and *share a common subspace*. We assume that a large amount $M$ of unlabeled data drawn from the sampling distribution $P$ is available, together with a small amount $N$ of "labeled" data drawn from the same distribution and noisy estimates of the corresponding ground truth entries. This setting is inspired by recommender systems scenarios where the unlabeled data corresponds to "implicit feedback" (consisting in interactions such as purchase, click, etc. ) and the labeled data corresponds to the `explicit feedback', consisting of interactions where the user has given an explicit rating to the item. Leveraging powerful results from the theory of low-rank subspace recovery, together with classic generalization bounds for matrix completion models, we show error bounds consisting of a sum of two error terms scaling as $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{nd}{M}}\right)$ and $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{dr}{N}}\right)$ respectively, where $d$ is the rank of $P$ and $r$ is the rank of $M$. In synthetic experiments, we confirm that the true generalization error naturally splits into independent error terms corresponding to the estimations of $P$ and and the ground truth matrix $G$ respectively. In real-life experiments on Douban and MovieLens with most explicit ratings removed, we demonstrate that the method can outperform baselines relying only on the explicit ratings, demonstrating that our assumptions provide a valid toy theoretical setting to study the interaction between explicit and implicit feedbacks in recommender systems.

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.

Failure-based variable ordering heuristics (VOH) are efficient general-purpose search heuristics for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). They learn from the failures detected during the search and select the variables that are most likely to fail. The current failure-based VOHs, i.e. FRBA and FLBA, focus on only the failures detected in left branches. In this paper, we investigate how the failure information from right branches affects the performance of the failure-based VOHs. Three strategies utilizing the failure information of right branches are proposed to refine the failure-based VOHs. Our experiments performed with the CSP instances used in recent MiniZinc challenge show that utilizing the failures detected in right branches enhances the performance of the failure-based VOHs. The refined version combining the three strategies gets the best performance. It demonstrates remarkable superiority over several general-purpose VOHs, including activity-based search, conflict-history search, refined weighted degree, pick/dom, and the existing FRBA, which are considered state-of-the-art. Our study demonstrates that right branch matters in failure-based VOHs for solving CSPs.

Right Branches Matter in Failure-based Variable Ordering Heuristics

Large language models have revolutionized agent planning by serving as the central reasoning engine. However, LLM-based agents often struggle to generalize across complex environments and to adapt to stochastic feedback arising from environment–action interactions. We propose Counterfactual Planning—a method designed to improve the generalizability and adaptability of agents' actions by inferring the causal representation of environmental confounders and performing counterfactual reasoning over planned actions. We formalize the agent planning process as a structural causal model, providing a mathematical formulation for causal analysis of how environmental states influence action generation and how actions affect future state transitions. To support generalizable action planning, we introduce the State Causality Evaluator (SCE), which dynamically infers task-conditioned causal representations from complex environment states; and to enhance adaptability under stochastic feedback, we propose the What-If-Not (WIN) reward, which performs counterfactual interventions to finish action refinement through causal evaluation. We validate our framework in an open-world environment, where experiments demonstrate improvements in both action generalization and planning adaptability.

Counterfactual Planning for Generalizable Agents’ Actions

Dynamic sequences with varying lengths have been widely used in the training of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs).
However, current training frameworks adopt a pre-defined static parallel strategy for these sequences, causing neither communication-parallelization cancellation on short sequences nor out-of-memory on long sequences.
To mitigate these issues, we propose ParaDySe, a novel adaptive Parallel strategy switching framework for Dynamic Sequences.
ParaDySe enables on-the-fly optimal strategy adoption according to the immediate input sequence.
It first implements the modular function libraries for parallel strategies with unified tensor layout specifications,
and then builds sequence-aware memory and time cost models with hybrid methods. 
Guided by cost models, ParaDySe selects optimal layer-wise strategies for dynamic sequences via an efficient heuristic algorithm.
By integrating these techniques together, ParaDySe achieves seamless hot-switching of optimal strategies through its well-designed function libraries.
We compare ParaDySe with baselines on representative LLMs under datasets with sequence lengths up to 624K. 
Experimental results indicate that ParaDySe addresses OOM and CPC bottlenecks in LLM training by systematically integrating long-sequence optimizations with existing frameworks.

ParaDySe: A Parallel Strategy Switching Framework for Dynamic Sequences in Transformer-based Large Language Models

Compared to single-target adversarial attacks, multi-target attacks have garnered significant attention due to their ability to generate adversarial images for multiple target classes simultaneously. However, existing generative approaches for multi-target attacks primarily encode target labels into one-dimensional tensors, leading to a loss of fine-grained visual information and overfitting to model-specific features during noise generation. To address this gap, we first identify and validate that the semantic feature quality and quantity are critical factors affecting the transferability of targeted attacks: 1) Feature quality refers to the structural and detailed completeness of the implanted target features, as deficiencies may result in the loss of key discriminative information; 2) Feature quantity refers to the spatial sufficiency of the implanted target features, as inadequacy limits the victim model's attention to this feature. Based on these findings, we propose the 2D Tensor-Guided Adversarial Fusion (TGAF) framework, which leverages the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models to encode target labels into two-dimensional semantic tensors for guiding adversarial noise generation. Additionally, we design a novel masking strategy tailored for the training process, ensuring that parts of the generated noise retain complete semantic information about the target class. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TGAF consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods across various settings.

Rethinking Target Label Conditioning in Adversarial Attacks: A 2D Tensor-Guided Generative Approach

Clean-image backdoor attacks, which use only label manipulation in training datasets to compromise deep neural networks, pose a significant threat to security-critical applications. A critical flaw in existing methods is that the poison rate required for a successful attack induces a proportional, and thus noticeable, drop in Clean Accuracy (CA), undermining their stealthiness. This paper presents a new paradigm for clean-image attacks that minimizes this accuracy degradation by optimizing the trigger itself. We introduce Generative Clean-Image Backdoors (GCB), a framework that uses a conditional InfoGAN to identify naturally occurring image features that can serve as potent and stealthy triggers. By ensuring these triggers are easily separable from benign task-related features, GCB enables a victim model to learn the backdoor from an extremely small set of poisoned examples, resulting in a CA drop of less than 1\%. Our experiments demonstrate GCB's remarkable versatility, successfully adapting to six datasets, five architectures, and four tasks, including the first demonstration of clean-image backdoors in regression and segmentation. GCB also exhibits resilience against most of the existing backdoor defenses.

Breaking the Stealth-Potency Trade-off in Clean-Image Backdoors with Generative Trigger Optimization

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to incorporate structured knowledge via graph retrieval as contextual input, enhancing more accurate and context-aware reasoning. We observe that for different queries, it could retrieve similar subgraphs as prompts, and thus we propose SubGCache, which aims to reduce inference latency by reusing computation across queries with similar structural prompts (i.e., subgraphs). Specifically, SubGCache clusters queries based on subgraph embeddings, constructs a representative subgraph for each cluster, and pre-computes the key-value (KV) cache of the representative subgraph. For each query with its retrieved subgraph within a cluster, it reuses the pre-computed KV cache of the representative subgraph of the cluster without computing the KV tensors again for saving computation. Experiments on two datasets across multiple LLM backbones and graph-based RAG frameworks demonstrate that SubGCache consistently reduces inference latency with comparable and even improved generation quality, achieving up to 6.68x reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT). The codes and datasets are available at Supplementary Material.

SubGCache: Accelerating Graph-based RAG with Subgraph-level KV Cache

Generative modeling has transformed many fields like language and visual modeling, while its exploit in financial market is under-explored. As the minimal unit within a financial market is an order, order flow modeling represents the fundamental generative financial task. However, current approaches often result in unsatisfactory fidelity in generating order flow, and their generation lacks controllability, thereby limiting their application scenario. In this paper, we advocate incorporating controllability into the market generation process, and propose a Diffusion Guided meta Agent (DiGA) model to address the challenge. Specifically, we utilize a diffusion model to capture dynamics of market state represented by time-evolving distribution parameters about mid-price return rate and order arrival rate, and define a meta agent with financial economic priors to generate orders from the corresponding distributions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits outstanding controllability and fidelity in generation. Furthermore, we validate DiGA's effectiveness as generative environment for downstream financial applications.

Controllable Financial Market Generation with Diffusion Guided Meta Agent

The quality of experience (QoE) delivered by video conferencing systems is significantly influenced by accurately estimating the time-varying available bandwidth between the sender and receiver. Bandwidth estimation for real-time communications remains an open challenge due to rapidly evolving network architectures, increasingly complex protocol stacks, and the difficulty of defining QoE metrics that reliably improve user experience. In this work, we propose a deployed, human-in-the-loop, data-driven framework for bandwidth estimation to address these challenges. Our approach begins with training objective QoE reward models derived from subjective user evaluations to measure audio and video quality in real-time video conferencing systems. Subsequently, we collect roughly $1$M network traces with objective QoE rewards from real-world Microsoft Teams calls to curate a bandwidth estimation training dataset. We then introduce a novel distributional offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to train a neural-network-based bandwidth estimator aimed at improving QoE for users. Our real-world A/B test demonstrates that the proposed approach reduces the subjective poor call ratio by $11.41\%$ compared to the baseline bandwidth estimator. Furthermore, the proposed offline RL algorithm is benchmarked on D4RL tasks to demonstrate its generalization beyond bandwidth estimation.

Human-in-the-Loop Bandwidth Estimation for Quality of Experience Optimization in Real-Time Video Communication

Anytime multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is a promising approach to scalable and collision-free path optimization in multi-agent systems. MAPF-LNS, based on Large Neighborhood Search (LNS), is the current state-of-the-art approach where a fast initial solution is iteratively optimized by destroying and repairing selected paths, i.e., a neighborhood, of the solution. Delay-based MAPF-LNS has demonstrated particular effectiveness in generating promising neighborhoods via seed agents according to their delays. Seed agents are selected using handcrafted strategies or online learning, where the former relies on human intuition about underlying structures, while the latter conducts black box optimization, ignoring any structure. In this paper, we propose Truncated Adaptive Counterfactual K-ranked LEarning (TACKLE) to select seed agents using human intuition for informed online learning. We show theoretically that TACKLE dominates its handcrafted and black box learning counterparts in the limit. Our experiments demonstrate cost improvements by at least 60% in instances with up to a thousand agents, compared with state-of-the-art anytime MAPF solvers.

Truncated Counterfactual Learning for Anytime Multi-Agent Path Finding

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread, especially in sensitive applications where fairness is essential and biased outputs can cause significant harm. However, evaluating the fairness of models is a complex challenge, and approaches that do so typically utilize standard question-answer (QA) styled schemes. Such methods often overlook deeper issues by interpreting the model's refusal responses as positive fairness measurements, which creates a false sense of fairness. In this work, we introduce the concept of silenced biases, which are unfair preferences encoded within models' latent space and are effectively concealed by safety-alignment. Previous approaches that considered similar indirect biases often relied on prompt manipulation or handcrafted implicit queries, which present limited scalability and risk contaminating the evaluation process with additional biases. We propose the Silenced Bias Benchmark (SBB), which aims to uncover these biases by employing activation steering to reduce model refusals during QA. SBB supports easy expansion to new demographic groups and subjects, presenting a fairness evaluation framework that encourages the future development of fair models and tools beyond the masking effects of alignment training. We demonstrate our approach over multiple LLMs, where our findings expose an alarming distinction between models' direct responses and their underlying fairness issues.

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Right Branches Matter in Failure-based Variable Ordering Heuristics

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