Singapore

In cooperative video games, traditional AI companions are deployed to assist players, who control them using hotkeys or command wheels to issue predefined commands such as &#39;&#39;attack&#39;&#39;, &#39;&#39;defend&#39;&#39;, or &#39;&#39;retreat&#39;&#39;. Despite their simplicity, these methods, which lack target specificity, limit players&#39; ability to give complex tactical instructions and hinder immersive gameplay experiences. To address this, we propose the FPS AI Companion who Understands Language (F.A.C.U.L.), the first real-time AI system that enables players to communicate and collaborate with AI companions using natural language. By integrating natural language processing with a confidence-based framework, F.A.C.U.L. efficiently decomposes complex commands and interprets player intent. It also employs a dynamic entity retrieval method for environmental awareness, aligning human intentions with decision-making. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, our method supports real-time language interactions, enabling players to issue complex commands such as &#39;&#39;clear the second floor,&#39;&#39; &#39;&#39;take cover behind that tree,&#39;&#39; or &#39;&#39;retreat to the river&#39;&#39;. The system provides real-time behavioral responses and vocal feedback, ensuring seamless tactical collaboration. Using the popular FPS game Arena Breakout: Infinite as a case study, we present comparisons demonstrating the efficacy of our approach and discuss the advantages and limitations of AI companions based on real-world user feedback.

AAAI 2026

F.A.C.U.L.: Language-Based Interaction with AI Companions in Gaming

hai: human-computer interaction

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

In cooperative video games, traditional AI companions are deployed to assist players, who control them using hotkeys or command wheels to issue predefined commands such as ''attack'', ''defend'', or ''retreat''. Despite their simplicity, these methods, which lack target specificity, limit players' ability to give complex tactical instructions and hinder immersive gameplay experiences. To address this, we propose the FPS AI Companion who Understands Language (F.A.C.U.L.), the first real-time AI system that enables players to communicate and collaborate with AI companions using natural language. By integrating natural language processing with a confidence-based framework, F.A.C.U.L. efficiently decomposes complex commands and interprets player intent. It also employs a dynamic entity retrieval method for environmental awareness, aligning human intentions with decision-making. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, our method supports real-time language interactions, enabling players to issue complex commands such as ''clear the second floor,'' ''take cover behind that tree,'' or ''retreat to the river''. The system provides real-time behavioral responses and vocal feedback, ensuring seamless tactical collaboration. Using the popular FPS game Arena Breakout: Infinite as a case study, we present comparisons demonstrating the efficacy of our approach and discuss the advantages and limitations of AI companions based on real-world user feedback.

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.

Accurate forecasting of multivariate time series data remains a formidable challenge, particularly due to the growing complexity of temporal dependencies in real-world scenarios. While neural network-based models have achieved notable success in this domain, complex channel-dependent models often suffer from performance degradation compared to channel-independent models that do not consider the relationship between components but provide high robustness due to small capacity. In this work, we propose HN-MVTS, a novel architecture that integrates a hypernetwork-based generative prior with an arbitrary neural network forecasting model. The input of this hypernetwork is a learnable embedding matrix of time series components. To restrict the number of new parameters, the hypernetwork learns to generate the weights of the last layer of the target forecasting networks, serving as a data-adaptive regularizer that improves generalization and long-range predictive accuracy. The hypernetwork is used only during the training, so it does not increase the inference time compared to the base forecasting model. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that application of HN-MVTS to the state-of-the-art models (DLinear, PatchTST, TSMixer, etc.) consistently improves their performance.

HN-MVTS: HyperNetwork-based Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

The proliferation of facial recognition (FR) systems has raised privacy concerns in the digital realm, as malicious uses of FR models pose a significant threat. Traditional countermeasures, such as makeup style transfer, have suffered from low transferability in black-box settings and limited applicability across various demographic groups, including males and individuals with darker skin tones. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel facial privacy protection method, dubbed MAP, a pioneering approach that employs human emotion modifications to disguise original identities as target identities in facial images. Our method uniquely fine-tunes a score network to learn dual objectives, target identity and human expression, which are jointly optimized through gradient projection to ensure convergence at a shared local optimum. Additionally, we enhance the perceptual quality of protected images by applying local smoothness regularization and optimizing the score matching loss within our network. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our innovative approach surpasses previous baselines, including noise-based, makeup-based, and freeform attribute methods, in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics. Furthermore, MAP proves its effectiveness against an online FR API and shows advanced adaptability in uncommon photographic scenarios. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MAP-REVIEW.

Machine Pareidolia: Protecting Facial Image with Emotional Editing

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from their latent spaces. However, SAE suffers from semantic entanglement, where individual neurons often mix multiple nonlinear concepts, making it difficult to reliably interpret or manipulate model behaviors. In this paper, we propose a semantically-guided SAE, called ProtSAE. Unlike existing SAE which requires annotation datasets to filter and interpret activations, we guide semantic disentanglement during training using both annotation datasets and domain knowledge to mitigate the effects of entangled attributes. We design interpretability experiments showing that ProtSAE learns more biologically relevant and interpretable hidden features compared to previous methods. Performance analyses further demonstrate that ProtSAE maintains high reconstruction fidelity while achieving better results in interpretable probing. We also show the potential of ProtSAE in steering PLMs for downstream generation tasks.

ProtSAE: Disentangling and Interpreting Protein Language Models via Semantically-Guided Sparse Autoencoders

Despite significant advancements in general AI, its effectiveness in the medical domain is limited by the lack of specialized medical knowledge. 
To address this, we formulate GMAI-VL-5.5M, a multimodal medical dataset created by converting hundreds of specialized medical datasets with various annotations into high-quality image-text pairs. 
This dataset offers comprehensive task coverage, diverse modalities, and rich image-text data. 
Building upon this dataset, we develop GMAI-VL, a general medical vision-language model, with a three-stage training strategy that enhances the integration of visual and textual information. 
This approach significantly improves the model's ability to process multimodal data, supporting accurate diagnoses and clinical decision-making. 
Experiments show that GMAI-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal medical tasks, including visual question answering and medical image diagnosis.

GMAI-VL & GMAI-VL-5.5M: A Large Vision-Language Model and a Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset Towards General Medical AI

Large language models have led to significant progress across many NLP tasks, although their massive sizes often incur substantial computational costs. Distillation has become a common practice to compress these large and highly capable models into smaller, more efficient ones. Many existing language model distillation methods can be viewed as behavior cloning from the perspective of imitation learning or inverse reinforcement learning. This viewpoint has inspired subsequent studies that leverage (inverse) reinforcement learning techniques, including variations of behavior cloning and temporal difference learning methods. Rather than proposing yet another specific temporal difference method, we introduce a general framework for temporal difference-based distillation by exploiting the distributional sparsity of the teacher model. Specifically, it is often observed that language models assign most probability mass to a small subset of tokens. Motivated by this observation, we design a temporal difference learning framework that operates on a reduced action space (a subset of vocabulary), and demonstrate how practical algorithms can be derived and the resulting performance improvements.

Language Model Distillation: A Temporal Difference Imitation Learning Perspective

3D visual grounding (3DVG) identifies objects in 3D scenes from language descriptions, with applications in augmented reality and embodied AI. Existing zero-shot approaches leverage 2D vision–language models (VLMs) by converting 3D spatial information (SI) into forms amenable to VLM processing, typically as composite visual inputs such as specified-view renderings or video sequences with overlaid object markers. However, this VLM~$\oplus$~SI paradigm yields entangled visual representations that compel the VLM to process entire cluttered cues, making it hard to exploit spatial–semantic relationships effectively.
In this work, we propose a new VLM~$\otimes$~SI paradigm that externalizes the 3D SI into a form that enables the VLM to incrementally retrieve only what it needs during its reasoning process.
We instantiate this paradigm with a novel View-on-Graph (VoG) method, which organizes the scene into a multi-modal, multi-layer scene graph and allows the VLM to operate as an active agent that selectively accesses necessary cues as it traverses the scene. This design offers two intrinsic advantages:
(i) by structuring 3D context into a spatially and semantically coherent scene graph rather than confounding the VLM with densely entangled visual inputs, it makes spatial–semantic relationships easier to exploit and lowers the VLM's reasoning difficulty; and
(ii) by actively exploring and reasoning over the scene graph, it naturally produces transparent, step-by-step traces for interpretable 3DVG.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VLM~$\otimes$~SI paradigm and show that VoG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, establishing structured scene exploration as a promising strategy for advancing zero-shot 3DVG.

View-on-Graph: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Vision-Language Reasoning on Scene Graphs

Resource-constrained weight deployment is a task of immense practical importance. Recently, there has been interest in the specific task of Delta Compression, where parties each hold a common base model and only communicate compressed weight updates. However, popular parameter efficient updates such as Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) face inherent representation limitations - which are especially pronounced when combined with aggressive quantization. To overcome this, we build on recent work that improves LoRA representation capacity by using fixed-frequency sinusoidal functions to increase stable rank without adding additional parameters. We extend this to the quantized setting and present the first theoretical analysis showing how stable rank evolves under quantization. From this, we introduce SineLoRA$\Delta$, a principled and effective method for delta compression that improves the expressivity of quantized low-rank adapters by applying a sinusoidal activation. We validate SineLoRA$\Delta$ across a diverse variety of domains - including language modeling, vision-language tasks, and text-to-image generation - achieving up to 66\% memory reduction with similar performance. We additionally provide a novel application of the canonical Bjøntegaard Delta metric to consistently compare adapter compression changes across the rate-distortion curve.

SineLoRA∆: Sine-Activated Delta Compression

Traditionally, AI research in medical diagnosis has largely centered on image analysis. While this has led to notable advancements, the absence of patient-reported symptoms continues to hinder diagnostic accuracy. To address this, we propose a Pre-Consultation Dialogue framework that mimics real-world diagnostic procedures, where doctors iteratively query patients before reaching a conclusion. Specifically, we simulate diagnostic dialogues between two vision–language models (VLMs): a DoctorVLM, which generates follow-up questions based on the image and dialogue history, and a PatientVLM, which responds using a symptom profile derived from the ground-truth diagnosis. We additionally conducted a small-scale clinical validation of the synthetic symptoms generated by our framework, confirming their usefulness for diagnosis. These DocVLM–PatientVLM interactions yield realistic, multi-turn dialogues paired with images and diagnoses, which are then used to fine-tune the DoctorVLM. This dialogue-based training substantially enhances diagnostic performance. For instance, using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as the base model, with symptoms generated using our framework achieves an F1 score of 81.0%, compared to just 56.5% with direct image-only fine-tuning on the DermaMNIST dataset.

PatientVLM Meets DocVLM: Pre-Consultation Dialogue Between Vision-Language Models for Efficient Diagnosis

Long-term, high-fidelity simulation of slow-changing physical systems, such as the ocean and climate, presents a fundamental challenge in scientific computing. Traditional autoregressive machine learning models often fail in these tasks as minor errors accumulate and lead to rapid forecast degradation. To address this problem, we propose NeuralOM, a general neural operator framework designed for simulating complex, slow-changing dynamics. NeuralOM's core consists of two key innovations: (1) a Progressive Residual Correction Framework that decomposes the forecasting task into a series of fine-grained refinement steps, effectively suppressing long-term error accumulation; and (2) a Physics-Guided Graph Network whose built-in adaptive messaging mechanism explicitly models multi-scale physical interactions, such as gradient-driven flows and multiplicative couplings, thereby enhancing physical consistency while maintaining computational efficiency. We validate NeuralOM on the challenging task of global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) ocean simulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuralOM not only surpasses state-of-the-art models in forecast accuracy and long-term stability, but also excels in simulating extreme events. For instance, at a 60-day lead time, NeuralOM achieves a 13.3% lower RMSE compared to the best-performing baseline, offering a stable, efficient, and physically-aware paradigm for data-driven scientific computing.

NeuralOM: Neural Ocean Model for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Simulation

Despite recent advances in LLMs, the task of code generation is still challenging. To cope, code selection algorithms select the best program from multiple programs generated by an LLM. However, existing algorithms can fail to identify the correct program, either because they can misidentify nonequivalent programs or because they rely on an LLM and assume it always correctly determines the output for every input. We present ExPairT-LLM, an exact learning algorithm for code selection that selects a program by posing to an LLM oracle two new types of queries: pairwise membership and pairwise equivalence. These queries are simpler for LLMs and enable ExPairT-LLM to identify the correct program through a tournament, which is robust to some LLM mistakes. We evaluate ExPairT-LLM on four popular code datasets. Its pass@1 (success rate) outperforms the state-of-the-art code selection algorithm on average by +13.0% and up to +27.1%. It also improves the pass@1 of LLMs performing complex reasoning by +24.0%.

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