Singapore

Several proof systems for model counting have been introduced in recent years, mainly in an attempt to model #SAT solving and to allow proof logging of solvers. We reexamine these different approaches and show that: 
(i) with slight adaptations, the conceptually quite different proof models of the dynamic system MICE (Fichte, Hecher, and Roland 2022) and the static system of annotated Decision DNNFs (Capelli, Lagniez, and Marquis 2021) are equivalent and 
(ii) they tightly characterise state-of-the-art #SAT solving. 
Thus, these proof systems provide a precise and robust proof-theoretic underpinning of current model counting. We also propose new strengthenings of these proof systems that might lead to stronger model counters.

AAAI 2026

Proof Systems That Tightly Characterise Model Counting Algorithms

krr: computational complexity of reasoning

krr: knowledge representation languages

cso: other foundations of constraint satisfaction

cso: satisfiability

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

Multi-agent debate (MAD) frameworks have emerged as promising approaches for misinformation detection by simulating adversarial reasoning. While prior work has focused on detection accuracy, it overlooks the importance of helping users understand the reasoning behind factual judgments and develop future resilience. The debate transcripts generated during MAD offer a rich but underutilized resource for transparent reasoning. 

In this study, we introduce ED2D, an evidence-based MAD framework that extends previous approach by incorporating factual evidence retrieval to support verifiable content. More importantly, ED2D is designed not only as a detection framework but also as a persuasive multi-agent system aimed at correcting user beliefs and discouraging misinformation sharing. We compare the persuasive effects of ED2D-generated debunking transcripts with those authored by human experts. 

Results demonstrate that ED2D outperforms existing baselines across three misinformation detection benchmarks. When ED2D generates correct predictions, its debunking transcripts exhibit persuasive effects comparable to those of human experts; However, when ED2D misclassifies, its accompanying explanations may inadvertently reinforce users’ misconceptions, even when presented alongside accurate human explanations. 

Our findings highlight both the promise and the potential risks of deploying MAD systems for misinformation intervention. We further develop a public community website to help users explore ED2D, fostering transparency, critical thinking, and collaborative fact-checking. The code, datasets and a demonstration video are included in the supplementary materials.

Beyond Detection: Exploring Evidence-based Multi-Agent Debate for Misinformation Intervention and Persuasion

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to improve factual accuracy by leveraging structured knowledge. However, real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are often incomplete, leading to the problem of Incomplete KGQA (IKGQA). A common solution is to incorporate external data to fill knowledge gaps, but existing methods lack the capacity to adaptively and contextually fuse multiple sources, failing to fully exploit their complementary strengths. To this end, we propose Debate over Mixed-knowledge (DoM), a novel framework that enables dynamic integration of structured and unstructured knowledge for IKGQA. Built upon the Multi-Agent Debate paradigm, DoM assigns specialized agents to perform inference over knowledge graphs and external texts separately, and coordinates their outputs through iterative interaction. It decomposes the input question into sub-questions, retrieves evidence via dual agents (KG and Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG), and employs a judge agent to evaluate and aggregate intermediate answers. This collaboration exploits knowledge complementarity and enhances robustness to KG incompleteness. In addition, existing IKGQA datasets simulate incompleteness by randomly removing triples, failing to capture the irregular and unpredictable nature of real-world knowledge incompleteness. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, Incomplete Knowledge Graph WebQuestions, constructed by leveraging real-world knowledge updates. These updates reflect knowledge beyond the static scope of KGs, yielding a more realistic and challenging benchmark. Through extensive experiments, we show that DoM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Code and dataset are available in the Supplementary Material.

Debate over Mixed-knowledge: A Robust Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have transformed multi-modal understanding, excelling in tasks like image captioning and visual question answering by integrating visual and textual inputs. However, their robustness against adversarial attacks—particularly those exploiting both modalities—remains underexplored, posing risks to critical applications like autonomous driving and content moderation. Existing attacks focus on single modalities or require impractical white-box access, limiting their real-world relevance. In this paper, we introduce \textit{Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy (MMAS)}, a groundbreaking framework that crafts universal, black-box multi-modal attacks against LVLMs. MMAS simultaneously generates a texture scale-constrained Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) for images and a learnable prompt perturbation for text, optimized jointly using only model queries. The image perturbation, bounded by an $\ell_{\infty}$-norm, leverages wavelet-based texture constraints to ensure imperceptibility and robustness across diverse visual inputs. The text perturbation, constrained by an $\ell_2$-norm in the embedding space, maintains semantic coherence while steering outputs toward a target. A novel cross-modal regularization term aligns the perturbations’ gradient directions, enhancing their synergistic impact and transferability across tasks and models.
Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the strong universal adversarial capabilities of our proposed attack with prevalent LVLMs, 
spanning a spectrum of tasks on various datasets, all achieved without delving into the details of the model structures.

Unveiling the Fragility of Vision-Language Models: Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy via Texture-Constrained Perturbations and Cross-Modal Optimization

Domain generalization (DG) and algorithmic fairness are two key challenges in machine learning. However, most DG methods focus solely on minimizing expected risk in the unseen target domain, without considering algorithmic fairness. Conversely, fairness methods typically do not account for domain shifts, so the fairness achieved during training may not generalize to unseen test domains. In this work, we bridge these gaps by studying the problem of Fair Domain Generalization (FairDG), which aims to minimize both expected risk and fairness violations in unseen target domains. We derive novel mutual information-based upper bounds for expected risk and fairness violations in multi-class classification tasks with multi-group sensitive attributes. These bounds provide key insights for algorithm design from an information-theoretic perspective. Guided by these insights, we propose a practical method that solves the FairDG problem through Pareto optimization. Experiments on real-world vision and language datasets show that our method achieves superior utility–fairness trade-offs compared to existing approaches.

Fair Domain Generalization: An Information-Theoretic View

Images are typically sampled on a uniform grid, despite the fact that visual information is distributed non-uniformly,leading inefficiency in processing.To reduce computation while retaining important content,recent studies have proposed predictive downsampling methods that adaptively downsample images based on predicted pixel importance.However, these methods require high-resolution processing to accurately estimate importance,which undermines their efficiency:the prediction stage itself must process the full-resolution image, consuming most of the computational budget.This high-resolution inference is necessary because each inputvaries significantly in structure and content.In this paper,we take a different approach and introduce a learn-to-downsample paradigm tailored for aligned vision recognition tasks,such as face and palmprint recognition,where input alignment ensures consistent spatial structure across images.Leveraging this property,we learn an input-agnostic downsampling template shared across all inputs.This enables significant acceleration while preserving task-specific performance,offering a more efficient and principled alternative to dynamic,prediction-based methods.Furthermore, instead of relying on implicit importance maps,we introduce a flow-based representation that directly models the spatial warping from the original image to thedownsampled version.Unlike importance map–based approaches that rely on gradients and default to uniform sampling in flat regions, our flow-based representation learns the sampling pattern directly, enabling more efficient downsampling even in textureless areas.Extensive experiments on face and palmprint recognition demonstrate that our method substantially reduces computational cost with minimal accuracy degradation, achieving a significantly better performance-efficiency trade-off than existing predictive downsampling methods.

Beyond Predictive Resampling: Learning Input-Agnostic Downsampling for Efficient Aligned Vision Recognition

Adversarial training is often modeled as a two-player zero-sum game, relying on strong assumptions that limit its practical guidance. In this paper, we instead analyze the interactions between training samples and show that even $\textbf{the fundamental objective—minimizing training loss—may not converge}$. To address this, we propose AT-Field, an adversarial training framework guided by sample-wise game-theoretic relationships. Specifically, we prove that training samples across different batches can form a none-potential game, where gradient descent induces cyclic behaviors, preventing convergence. By strategically searching and grouping these samples within the same batch, AT-Field transforms none-potential games into exact potential games, which are more effectively optimized using gradient-based methods. Experiments demonstrate that AT-Field integrates seamlessly with existing adversarial training techniques, enhancing both accuracy and robustness.

AT-Field: Rethinking the Games in Adversarial Training

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. As these systems scale in complexity, cost becomes an important consideration for practical deployment. However, existing work rarely addresses how to structure multi-agent systems under explicit budget constraints. In this paper, we propose BAMAS, a novel approach for building multi-agent systems with budget awareness. BAMAS first selects an optimal set of LLMs by formulating and solving an Integer Linear Programming problem that balances performance and cost. It then determines how these LLMs should collaborate by leveraging a reinforcement learning-based method to select the interaction topology. Finally, the system is instantiated and executed based on the selected agents and their collaboration topology. We evaluate BAMAS on three representative tasks and compare it with state-of-the-art agent construction methods. Results show that BAMAS achieves comparable performance while reducing cost by up to 86%.

BAMAS: Structuring Budget-Aware Multi-Agent Systems

We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations.
We focus on envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) — an important fairness notion in fair division of indivisible goods. A central open question in this field is whether EFX allocations always exist for any number of agents. While prior work has established EFX existence for settings with at most three distinct valuations (Prakash HV et al. 2025) and for two types of goods (Gorantla, Marwaha, and Velusamy 2023), the general case remains unresolved.

In this paper, we extend the existent knowledge by proving that EFX allocations satisfying Pareto optimality (PO) always exist and can be computed in quasiliniear time when there are two types of goods, given that the valuations are positive. This result strengthens the existing work of (Gorantla, Marwaha, and Velusamy 2023), which only guarantees the existence of EFX allocations without ensuring Pareto optimality. Our findings demonstrate a fairly simple and efficient algorithm constructing an EFX+PO allocation.

EFX and PO Allocation Exists for Two Types of Goods

Existing neural vocoders have demonstrated promising performance by leveraging Mel-spectrum as an acoustic feature for conditional audio generation. Nevertheless, they remain constrained by an inherent “performance-cost” dilemma that significantly hinders the development of this field. This paper revisits this foundational task from a novel degradation perspective, where Mel-spectrum is regarded as a special signal degradation process from the target spectrum. Drawing inspiration from traditional sparse signal recovery problems, we
propose DegVoC, a GAN-based neural vocoder with a two-step solution procedure. First, by exploiting degradation priors, we attempt to retrieve the initial spectral structure from Mel-domain representations as an initial solution via a simple linear transformation. Based on that, we introduce a deep prior solver that accounts for the heterogeneous distribution of sub-bands in the time-frequency domain. A convolution-style attention module with a large kernel size is specially devised for efficient inter-frame and inter-band contextual modeling. With only 3.89 M parameters and substantially reduced inference complexity, DegVoC achieves state-of-the-art performance across objective and subjective evaluations, outperforming existing GAN-, DDPM- and flow-matching-based baselines.

DegVoC: Revisiting Neural Vocoder from a Degradation Perspective

We present the first evaluation harness that enables any out-of-the-box, local, Large Language Models (LLMs) to play full-press Diplomacy without fine-tuning or specialized training. Previous work required frontier LLMs, or fine-tuning, due to the high complexity and information density of Diplomacy's game state. Combined with the high variance of matches, these factors made Diplomacy prohibitive for study. In this work, we used data-driven iteration to optimize a textual game state representation such that a 24B model can reliably complete matches without any fine tuning. We develop tooling to facilitate hypothesis testing and statistical analysis, and we present case studies on persuasion, aggressive playstyles, and performance across a range of models. We conduct a variety of experiments across many popular LLMs, finding the larger models perform the best, but the smaller models still play adequately. We also introduce Critical State Analysis: an experimental protocol for rapidly iterating and analyzing key moments in a game at depth. Our harness democratizes the evaluation of strategic reasoning in LLMs by eliminating the need for fine-tuning, and it provides insights into how these capabilities emerge naturally from widely used LLMs. Our code is available in the supplement and will be open sourced.

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Beyond Detection: Exploring Evidence-based Multi-Agent Debate for Misinformation Intervention and Persuasion

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