Singapore

The rapid and reliable assembly of defect-free atom arrays is a fundamental challenge for scaling neutral atom quantum computing. While parallel rearrangement methods using spatial light modulators (SLMs) show promise, they suffer from significant computational overhead in two key sub-tasks: atom-site matching and hologram generation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to address these bottlenecks and enhance the efficiency and fidelity of the assembly process. Our approach features a new optimization objective for atom-site matching that minimizes the longest movement path, and a Fourier U-Net model that integrates a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to enable real-time hologram generation. The model is trained in a fully unsupervised paradigm, leveraging the physical properties of holography to eliminate the need for costly ground-truth labels. Experimental results demonstrate our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised CNNs but also achieves an inference speed orders of magnitude faster than traditional iterative algorithms, enabling real-time, dynamic atom rearrangement.

AAAI 2026

Towards Real-Time Neutral Atom Array Assembly via Unsupervised Hologram Generation and Path Optimization

neutral atom quantum computing

neutral atom array assembly

ai for quantum

## Dr. Nishikant (Nish) Sonwalkar: Academician, Scientist, Musician

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/0f9b63a0b3deba4a355d98e2c87af68a.png)

Dr. Sonwalkar is regarded as a leading expert in the application of computers in education. He has extensive research and development experience in hypermedia authoring, mobile learning, adaptive learning, and brain-based synaptic learning, advanced scientific visualization, database management systems, and computer simulation.

After receiving doctoral degree from MIT in the area of Molecular Dynamics of Nano-interfaces, he joined MIT as faculty in Mechanical Engineering, but his passion for technology enabled education led him become the founding director of Hypermedia Teaching Facility (Hypermedia Lab) at MIT and later he was appointed as the Principal Educational Architect of MIT.

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NISH 2021

poster

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.

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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.

In the agricultural domain, the deployment of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by the lack of training data and evaluation benchmarks. To mitigate this issue, we propose AgriEval, the first comprehensive Chinese agricultural benchmark with three main characteristics: (1) \textit{Comprehensive Capability Evaluation.} AgriEval covers six major agriculture categories and 29 subcategories within agriculture, addressing four core cognitive scenarios—memorization, understanding, inference, and generation. (2) \textit{High-Quality Data.} The dataset is curated from university-level examinations and assignments, providing a natural and robust benchmark for assessing the capacity of LLMs to apply knowledge and make expert-like decisions. (3) \textit{Diverse Formats and Extensive Scale.} AgriEval comprises 14,697 multiple-choice questions and 2,167 open-ended question-and-answer questions, establishing it as the most extensive agricultural benchmark available to date. We also present comprehensive experimental results over 51 open-source and commercial LLMs. The experimental results reveal that most existing LLMs struggle to achieve 60\% accuracy, underscoring the developmental potential in agricultural LLMs. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate factors influencing model performance and propose strategies for enhancement.

AgriEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Agricultural Benchmark for Large Language Models

We revisit the problem of generating synthetic data under differential privacy.
To address the core limitations of marginal-based methods, we propose the Private Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network with Bayes Network Structure ($\texttt{PrAda-GAN}$), which integrates the strengths of both GAN-based and marginal-based approaches.
Our method adopts a sequential generator architecture to capture complex dependencies among variables, while adaptively regularizing the learned structure to promote sparsity in the underlying Bayes network.
Theoretically, we establish diminishing bounds on the parameter distance, variable selection error, and Wasserstein distance.
Our analysis shows that leveraging dependency sparsity leads to significant improvements in convergence rates.
Empirically, experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that $\texttt{PrAda-GAN}$ outperforms existing tabular data synthesis methods in terms of the privacy–utility trade-off.

PrAda-GAN: A Private Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network with Bayes Network Structure

Deep learning models often achieve high accuracy but lack interpretability, making them unsuitable for critical applications such as medical diagnosis, biomolecule design, criminal justice, etc. The Sparse High-Order Interaction Model (SHIM) addresses this limitation by providing both transparency and predictive reliability. However, real-world data often contain outliers, which can distort model performance. To overcome this, we propose Huberized-SHIM, an extension of SHIM that integrates Huber loss-based robust regression to mitigate the impact of outliers. We introduce a homotopy-based exact regularization path algorithm and a novel tree-pruning criterion to efficiently manage interaction complexity. Additionally, we incorporate the conformal prediction framework to enhance statistical reliability. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior robustness and accuracy of Huberized-SHIM in high-stakes decision-making contexts.

Statistically Robust Sparse High-order Interaction Model

Drag-Based Image Editing (DBIE), which allows users to manipulate images by directly dragging objects within them, has recently attracted much attention from the community. However, it faces two key challenges: (\emph{i}) point-based drag is often highly ambiguous and difficult to align with user intentions; (\emph{ii}) current DBIE methods primarily rely on alternating between motion supervision and point tracking, which is not only cumbersome but also fails to produce high-quality results. These limitations motivate us to explore DBIE from a new perspective---unifying it as a Latent Region Optimization (LRO) problem that aims to use region-level geometric transformations to optimize latent code to realize drag manipulation. Thus, by specifying the areas and types of geometric transformations, we can effectively address the ambiguity issue. We also propose a simple yet effective editing framework, dubbed \textbf{DragNeXt}. It solves LRO through Progressive Backward Self-Intervention (PBSI), simplifying the overall procedure of the alternating workflow while further enhancing quality by fully leveraging region-level structure information and progressive guidance from intermediate drag states. We validate \textbf{DragNeXt} on our NextBench, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly outperform existing approaches. Code will be released on~github.

DragNeXt: Rethinking Drag-Based Image Editing

Operationalizing definitions of fairness is difficult in practice, as multiple definitions can be incompatible while each being arguably desirable. Instead, it may be easier to directly describe algorithmic bias through ad-hoc assumptions specific to a particular real-world task, e.g., based on background information on systemic biases in its context. Such assumptions can, in turn, be used to mitigate this bias during training. Yet, a framework for incorporating such assumptions that is simultaneously principled, flexible, and interpretable is currently lacking. Our approach is to formalize bias assumptions as programs in ProbLog, a probabilistic logic programming language that allows for the description of probabilistic causal relationships through logic. Neurosymbolic extensions of ProbLog then allow for easy integration of these assumptions in a neural network's training process. We propose a set of templates to express different types of bias and show the versatility of our approach on synthetic tabular datasets with known biases. Using estimates of the bias distortions present, we also succeed in mitigating algorithmic bias in real-world tabular and image data. We conclude that ProbLog4Fairness outperforms baselines due to its ability to flexibly model the relevant bias assumptions, where other methods typically uphold a fixed bias type or notion of fairness.

ProbLog4Fairness: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Modeling and Mitigating Bias

While fusing the capacities and advantages of various large language models offers a pathway to construct more powerful and versatile models, a fundamental challenge is to properly select advantageous model during training. 
Existing fusion methods primarily focus on the training mode that uses cross entropy on ground truth in a teacher-forcing setup to measure a model's advantage, which may provide limited insight towards model advantage. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that enhances the fusion process by incorporating both the training and inference modes. Our method evaluates model advantage not only through cross entropy during training but also by considering inference outputs, providing a more comprehensive assessment. To combine the two modes effectively, we introduce ProFuser to progressively transition from inference mode to training mode. To validate ProFuser's effectiveness, we fused three models, including Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Llama-2-7B-Chat, and MPT-7B-8K-Chat, and demonstrated the improved performance in knowledge, reasoning, and safety compared to baseline methods.

ProFuser: Progressive Fusion of Large Language Models

Inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition from Thinking, Fast and Slow, we introduce PRIME (Planning and Retrieval-Integrated Memory for Enhanced Reasoning), a multi-agent reasoning framework that dynamically integrates System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) and System 2 (slow, deliberate thinking). PRIME first employs a Quick Thinking Agent to generate a rapid answer; if uncertainty is detected, it then triggers a structured System 2 reasoning pipeline composed of specialized agents for planning, hypothesis generation, retrieval, information integration, and decision-making. This multi-agent design mimics human cognitive processes faithfully and enhances both efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results with LLaMA 3 models demonstrate that PRIME enables open-source LLMs to perform competitively with state-of-the-art closed-source models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o on benchmarks requiring multi-hop and knowledge-grounded reasoning. This research establishes PRIME as a scalable solution for improving LLMs in domains requiring complex, knowledge-intensive reasoning.

PRIME: Planning and Retrieval-Integrated Memory for Enhanced Reasoning

Data selection for instruction tuning is crucial for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) while reducing training costs. In this paper, we propose **R**efined **Co**ntribution Measurement with **I**n-**Co**ntext Learning (RICo), a novel gradient-free method that quantifies the fine-grained contribution of individual samples to both task-level and global-level model performance. RICo enables more accurate identification of high-contribution data, leading to better instruction tuning. We also introduce a lightweight selection paradigm trained on RICo scores, enabling scalable data selection with strictly linear inference complexity. Extensive experiments on 3 LLMs across 12 benchmarks and 5 pairwise evaluation sets demonstrate the effectiveness of RICo. Remarkably, on LLaMA3.1-8B, models trained on 15% of RICo-selected data outperform full datasets by 5.42 percentage points and exceed the best performance of widely used selection methods by 1.48 percentage points. We further analyze high-contribution samples selected by RICo, which show both diverse tasks and appropriate difficulty levels, rather than just the hardest ones.

RICo: Refined In-Context Contribution for Automatic Instruction-Tuning Data Selection

Time series forecasting plays a critical role across a wide range of domains. Recently, an increasing number of Transformer-based forecasting models have emerged, achieving remarkably competitive performance. However, real-world time series data often exhibit complex multi-scale periodicities, which are not well-suited for modeling by the original Transformer architecture originally developed for NLP tasks. To address this limitation, we propose the Hierarchical Multi-scale Time Series Transformer (HMformer), employing a novel and sophisticated framework specifically designed for multi-scale time series forecasting. Specifically, HMformer incorporates a hierarchical cross-scale mixing mechanism that progressively aggregates temporal information from fine to coarse granularities, a scale-adaptive feature expansion design enhancing the extraction of high-level temporal semantics, and a multi-branch complementary prediction strategy for effectively integrating diverse temporal patterns. Collectively, these components enable HMformer to capture intricate, multi-scale temporal dynamics while retaining the Transformer’s inherent strength in modeling long-range dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world benchmark datasets—encompassing both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks—demonstrate that HMformer achieves state-of-the-art performance.

HMformer: Unleashing Transformer’s Potential for Time Series Forecasting via Hierarchical Multi-Scale Modeling

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a sparse neural architecture that significantly increases model capacity while maintaining low computational complexity. However, deploying MoE-based large language models (LLMs) on memory-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to their substantial memory requirements. To address this issue, we propose FIRM-MoE, a fine-grained expert offloading framework designed to enable flexible and efficient MoE inference. The core insight of our approach is to reduce the risk of inaccurate expert loading by decomposing each expert into fine-grained sub-experts and then dynamically allocating them through a fine-grained scheduling strategy. To further reduce the error in expert loading, we introduce a multi-layer expert prediction mechanism and a resource-adaptive expert pre-loading algorithm to enable more robust expert allocation. This design allows our model to achieve more efficient expert utilization and improved resilience to prediction errors. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of FIRM-MoE across diverse memory constraints. The results show that FIRM-MoE achieves up to 1.5× speedup and 2.8× memory savings in decoding, compared to state-of-the-art MoE offloading strategies.

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AgriEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Agricultural Benchmark for Large Language Models

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