Singapore

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose **R**ecursive **E**valuation and **A**daptive **P**lanning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP&#39;s performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

AAAI 2026

REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

nlp: question answering

nlp: (large) language models

nlp: generation

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose **R**ecursive **E**valuation and **A**daptive **P**lanning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

poster

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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.

Inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient are used to inform and motivate public policymaking, and are increasingly applied to digital platforms.
We analyze how measures fare in pseudonymous settings, as common to internet-based or blockchain-based platforms.
One key challenge that arises is the ability of actors to create multiple fake identities under fictitious false names, also known as ``Sybils.''
While some actors may do so to preserve their privacy, we show that this can inadvertently distort inequality metrics.
We prove a set of impossibilities for Sybil-proof measures that simultaneously satisfy subsets of the literature's canonical set of desired properties, and show that a wide range of commonly used measures are indeed sensitive to Sybil manipulations, including the famous Gini coefficient.
We present several classes of Sybil-proof measures, and, by fully characterizing them, we prove that the structure imposed restricts their ability to assess inequality at a fine-grained level.
In addition, we examine which popular inequality metrics are vulnerable to Sybil manipulations and the dynamics that result in the creation of Sybils, whether in pseudonymous settings or traditional ones.

Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been proven to be an effective optimization technique for improving generalization in overparameterized models. While prior works have explored the implicit regularization of SAM in simple two-core scale-invariant settings, its behavior in more general tensorized or scale-invariant models remains underexplored. In this work, we leverage scale-invariance to analyze the norm dynamics of SAM in general tensorized models. We introduce the notion of Norm Deviation as a global measure of core norm imbalance, and derive its evolution under SAM using gradient flow analysis. We show that SAM's implicit control of Norm Deviation is governed by the covariance between core norms and their gradient magnitudes. Motivated by these findings, we propose a simple yet effective method, Deviation-Aware Scaling (DAS), which explicitly mimics this regularization behavior by scaling core norms in a data-adaptive manner. Our experiments across tensor completion, noisy training, model compression, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning confirm that DAS achieves competitive or improved performance over SAM, while offering reduced computational overhead.

Unpacking the Implicit Norm Dynamics of Sharpness-Aware Minimization in Tensorized Models

Cartesian abstractions can flexibly approximate planning tasks to generate admissible heuristic functions. Constrained abstractions use state constraints, such as mutexes, to eliminate parts of the abstraction that cannot belong to solutions for the original problem. While this has been successfully applied to simple forms of abstraction, no previous work has explored how to do this for Cartesian abstractions.

We introduce constrained Cartesian abstractions, which leverage state constraints in multiple ways: to prune spurious transitions and to simplify or even remove abstract states. Moreover, we also use disambiguation to better guide the counterexample-guided process used to generate the abstractions. Our experimental results show that the resulting constrained Cartesian abstractions induce more informed heuristics than their non-constrained counterpart.

Not Everything Is Permitted: Constrained Cartesian Abstractions for Optimal Classical Planning

We introduce a new task of open-world object counting in videos: given a text description, or an image example, that specifies the target object, the objective is to enumerate all the unique instances of the target objects in the video. This task is especially challenging in crowded scenes with occlusions and objects of similar appearance, where avoiding double counting and identifying reappearances is crucial. To this end, we make the following contributions: we introduce a model, CountVid, for this task. It leverages an image-based counting model, and a promptable video segmentation and tracking model, to enable automated open-world object counting across video frames. To evaluate its performance, we introduce VideoCount, a new dataset for this novel task built from the TAO and MOT20 tracking datasets, as well as from videos of penguins and metal alloy crystallization captured by x-rays. Using this dataset, we demonstrate that CountVid provides accurate object counts, and significantly outperforms strong baselines. The VideoCount dataset, the CountVid model, and all the code will be publicly released.

Open-World Object Counting in Videos

Multi-unit bilateral trade refers to the setting, where there is a buyer and a seller, who holds a finite number of units of an indivisible item. An automated mechanism has to decide how many units are transferred from the seller to the buyer and the corresponding payment from the buyer to the seller. The buyer and the seller have both either increasing or increasing submodular valuation functions in the number of units in possession. The (single-unit) bilateral trade problem arises as a particular case.

We study the problem of social welfare maximisation by establishing the fraction (\emph{approximation ratio}) of the optimal social welfare that a fixed-price mechanism can recover. Fixed-price mechanisms, understood as per-unit price in the multi-unit setting, have been characterised as the only truthful, individually rational and strongly budget balanced mechanisms by (Gerstgrasser et al. 2019) and (Hagerty and Rogerson 1987). We narrow the gap on the approximation ratio of optimal fixed-price mechanisms for bilateral trade, which has been shown to lie between $0.72$ and $0.7381$ by (Cai and Wu 2023). We show that it must lie between $0.728$ and $0.73805$, which leads to improved bounds on the approximation ratio of optimal fixed-price mechanisms for multi-unit bilateral trade. In particular, we show that multi-unit bilateral trade is at least as hard as single-unit bilateral trade, and obtain several hardnesses for different numbers of units.

On the Approximation Ratio of Optimal Fixed-Price Mechanisms for Single and Multi-Unit Bilateral Trade

Probabilistic decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields inconsistent outputs, particularly on complex or long-form questions. Self-Consistency (SC) mitigates this for short-form QA by majority voting over exact strings, whereas Universal Self-Consistency (USC) and Weighted Unigram Consistency Score (WUCS) extend to long-form responses but lose accuracy on short-form benchmarks. 

We introduce $\textbf{Latent Self-Consistency (LSC)}$, which selects the most semantically consistent response using learnable token embeddings. A lightweight forward generation of summary tokens increases inference time by less than 1% and requires no changes to the model architecture.

Across 6 short-form and 5 long-form reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH, MMLU, TruthfulQA), LSC surpasses SC, USC and WUCS on all short-form and long-form ones on average, while maintaining negligible computational overhead. These results position LSC as a practical consistency-selection method that works reliably across answer formats.
Additionally, LSC provides well-calibrated confidence estimates, maintaining low Expected Calibration Error across both answer formats.

Latent Self-Consistency for Reliable Majority-Set Selection in Short- and Long-Answer Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed natural language understanding and generation, but they raise privacy concerns due to potential exposure of sensitive information. Studies have highlighted the risk of information leakage, where adversaries can extract sensitive information embedded in the prompts. In this work, we introduce a novel private prediction framework for generating high-quality synthetic text with strong privacy guarantees. Our approach leverages the Differential Privacy (DP) framework to ensure worst-case theoretical bounds on information leakage without requiring any fine-tuning of the underlying models.The proposed method performs inference on private records and aggregates the resulting per-token output distributions. This enables the generation of longer and coherent synthetic text while maintaining privacy guarantees. Additionally, we propose a simple blending operation that combines private and public inference to further enhance utility. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on in-context-learning (ICL) tasks, making it a promising direction for privacy-preserving text generation while maintaining high utility.

Privacy Preserving In-Context-Learning Framework for Large Language Models

Accurate 3D vehicle pose and shape reconstruction from monocular images remains a formidable challenge for autonomous driving, particularly for distant, occluded, or small objects. Existing methods often suffer from geometric ambiguity in depth estimation and structural hollowness in shape recovery, primarily due to inadequate multi-scale feature aggregation and inflexible prior modeling. To overcome these limitations, a novel framework termed MonoVPR is proposed by integrating dynamic context adaptation and progressive geometry refinement. Specifically, a Hierarchical Dual-Context Attention (HDCA) module is introduced to resolve scale-dependent degradation through gated cross-attention across multi-resolution feature maps, dynamically fusing object-centric geometric cues with scene-centric semantics. For shape refinement, the Bounded Iterative Mesh Refiner (BIMR) is developed, where template-guided deformations are progressively optimized via multi-head deformable attention and a tanh-bounded correction loop, ensuring physically plausible reconstructions. Extensive experiments on the ApolloCar3D benchmark demonstrate MonoVPR achieves state-of-the-art performance, showcasing exceptional capability in reconstructing geometrically consistent shapes and precise poses for challenging long-range and occluded scenarios.

Monocular Vehicle Pose and Shape Reconstruction via Dynamic Context Adaptation and Progressive Geometry Refinement

Automatic presentation slide generation can greatly streamline content creation. However, since preferences of each user may vary, existing under-specified formulations often lead to suboptimal results that fail to align with individual user needs. We introduce a novel task that conditions slide generation on user-specified preferences. We propose a human-behavior-inspired agentic framework, SlideTailor, that progressively generates editable slides in a user-aligned manner. Instead of requiring users to write their preferences in detailed textual form, our system only asks for a paper–slides example pair and a visual template—natural and easy-to-provide artifacts that implicitly encode rich user preferences across content and visual style. Despite the implicit and unlabeled nature of these inputs, our framework effectively distills and generalizes the preferences to guide customized slide generation. We also introduce a novel chain-of-speech mechanism to align slide content with planned oral narration. Such a design significantly enhances the quality of generated slides and enables downstream applications like video presentations. To support this new task, we construct a benchmark dataset that captures diverse user preferences, with meticulously designed interpretable metrics for robust evaluation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Code and data will be released upon paper publication.

SlideTailor: Personalized Presentation Slide Generation for Scientific Papers

A major challenge in developing robust and generalizable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems for smart homes is the lack of large and diverse labeled datasets. Variations in home layouts, sensor configurations, and individual behaviors further exacerbate this issue. To address this, we leverage the idea of embodied AI agents—virtual agents that perceive and act within simulated environments guided by internal world models. We introduce AgentSense, a virtual data generation pipeline in which agents live out daily routines in simulated smart homes, with behavior guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLM generates diverse synthetic personas and realistic routines grounded in the environment, which are then decomposed into fine-grained actions. These actions are executed in an extended version of the VirtualHome simulator, which we augment with virtual ambient sensors that record the agents’ activities. Our approach produces rich, privacy-preserving sensor data that reflects real-world diversity. We evaluate AgentSense on five real HAR datasets. Models pretrained on the generated data consistently outperform baselines, especially in low-resource settings. Furthermore, combining the generated virtual sensor data with a small amount of real data achieves performance comparable to training on full real-world datasets. These results highlight the potential of using LLM-guided embodied agents for scalable and cost-effective sensor data generation in HAR.

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