Singapore

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a powerful yet resource-intensive approach for post-training large language models (LLMs). Incorporating curriculum learning (CL) into RL has been shown to significantly improve training efficiency, particularly in reasoning tasks. However, existing CL methods face substantial challenges in multi-objective RL (MORL) settings, including: (1) difficulty in evaluating model capabilities online, (2) challenges in assessing sample importance under diverse objectives, and (3) inherent trade-offs between online training and offline inference in dynamically designing the curriculum. To address these issues, we propose a **M**ulti-**R**eward space guided **A**daptive **C**urriculum **L**earning framework (**MRACL**), which is the first to incorporate curriculum learning into multi-objective RL. MRACL first constructs a multi-dimensional reward space via offline inference to establish initial reward profiles for each training sample. During training, based on reward space, it estimates the evolving model capabilities by computing the centroid of the space and calculates the sample priority score through its capability distance, optimization direction and historical evolution, which enables adaptive selection of the most informative training samples at each step, independent of the specific RL algorithm. After each RL training iteration, the reward space is dynamically updated to reflect the model&#39;s evolving capabilities and the shifting distribution of sample priorities. Experiments on multi-objective alignment tasks demonstrate that MRACL achieves 1.62× faster convergence compared to state-of-the-art curriculum methods and 2.55× faster than non-curriculum methods. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms all baselines in both win rate and rule-based evaluation metrics. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the key factors contributing to MRACL&#39;s effectiveness, and summarize its advantages, applicable scenarios, and generalization across diverse experimental settings.

AAAI 2026

MRACL: Multi-Reward Space Guided Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

multi-objectives reinforcement learning

large language model

curriculum learning

### Welcome!
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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a powerful yet resource-intensive approach for post-training large language models (LLMs). Incorporating curriculum learning (CL) into RL has been shown to significantly improve training efficiency, particularly in reasoning tasks. However, existing CL methods face substantial challenges in multi-objective RL (MORL) settings, including: (1) difficulty in evaluating model capabilities online, (2) challenges in assessing sample importance under diverse objectives, and (3) inherent trade-offs between online training and offline inference in dynamically designing the curriculum. To address these issues, we propose a **M**ulti-**R**eward space guided **A**daptive **C**urriculum **L**earning framework (**MRACL**), which is the first to incorporate curriculum learning into multi-objective RL. MRACL first constructs a multi-dimensional reward space via offline inference to establish initial reward profiles for each training sample. During training, based on reward space, it estimates the evolving model capabilities by computing the centroid of the space and calculates the sample priority score through its capability distance, optimization direction and historical evolution, which enables adaptive selection of the most informative training samples at each step, independent of the specific RL algorithm. After each RL training iteration, the reward space is dynamically updated to reflect the model's evolving capabilities and the shifting distribution of sample priorities. Experiments on multi-objective alignment tasks demonstrate that MRACL achieves 1.62× faster convergence compared to state-of-the-art curriculum methods and 2.55× faster than non-curriculum methods. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms all baselines in both win rate and rule-based evaluation metrics. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the key factors contributing to MRACL's effectiveness, and summarize its advantages, applicable scenarios, and generalization across diverse experimental settings.

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.

This talk surveys my research journey toward building
reliable machine learning systems that behave safely and
predictably in the open world. While modern machine
learning models—including foundation models (FMs)—have
demonstrated unprecedented capabilities, they often suffer
from reliability failures under distribution shift, leading
to overconfident mispredictions, hallucinated generations,
or susceptibility to adversarial prompts. My research
rethinks reliability not as an afterthought, but as a
first-class algorithmic principle, to be optimized
alongside accuracy with minimal human supervision.


The talk is organized around three key threads. To respect
the allotted 20-30 minutes, the first and second parts
will be briefly discussed.


1. Unknown-Aware Learning via Outlier Synthesis.
I introduce a class of learning algorithms that synthesize
“virtual outliers” in representation or pixel space to
explicitly teach models what they don’t know. This includes
the VOS, NPOS, and Dream-OOD frameworks, which shape the
energy landscape around in-distribution data to avoid
overconfidence on OOD.



2. Learning in the Wild with Unlabeled Data.
I present theoretical insights and practical algorithms for
leveraging unlabeled in-the-wild data to improve
reliability. This includes SAL framework, which uses a
gradient-based spectral method to separate potential
outliers, and SCONE, which handles semantic and covariate
shifts via constrained optimization. These results turn
unlabeled data contamination into a learning signal.



3. Reliable Foundation Models.
I explore reliability failures in LLMs and multimodal
systems. I introduce HaloScope for hallucination detection
via subspace separation on LLM representations, and TSV
that performs LLM latent steering for improved
hallucination detection. I will also briefly cover the LLM
security and alignment, which includes VLMGuard for
detecting malicious prompts in vision-language models and a
data-centric paradigm for AI alignment through source-aware
feedback cleaning.

Throughout the talk, I highlight how representation
learning, data generation, and theoretical guarantees
intersect to produce scalable, label-efficient reliability
methods. I will also reflect on my broader vision:
designing proactive and collaborative AI systems that
anticipate uncertainty and support rich human-AI
interaction—especially for underrepresented communities and
emerging scientific domains.



This talk will be accessible to a broad AAAI audience,
combining foundational algorithmic insights with real-world
applications and forward-looking perspectives on the future
of responsible AI.

Teach AI What It Doesn’t Know

Large-scale tuberculosis (TB) screening is limited by the high cost and operational complexity of traditional diagnostics, creating a need for artificial-intelligence solutions. We propose DeepGB-TB, a non-invasive system that instantly assigns TB risk scores using only cough audio and basic demographic data. The model couples a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network for audio processing with a gradient-boosted decision tree for tabular features. Its principal innovation is a Cross-Modal Bidirectional Cross-Attention module (CM-BCA) that iteratively exchanges salient cues between modalities, emulating the way clinicians integrate symptoms and risk factors. To meet the clinical priority of minimizing missed cases, we design a Tuberculosis Risk-Balanced Loss (TRBL) that places stronger penalties on false-negative predictions, thereby reducing high-risk misclassifications. DeepGB-TB is evaluated on a diverse dataset of 1,105 patients collected across seven countries, achieving an AUROC of 0.903 and an F1-score of 0.851, representing a new state of the art. Its computational efficiency enables real-time, offline inference directly on common mobile devices, making it ideal for low-resource settings. Importantly, the system produces clinically validated explanations that promote trust and adoption by frontline health workers. By coupling AI innovation with public-health requirements for speed, affordability, and reliability, DeepGB-TB offers a tool for advancing global TB control.

DeepGB-TB: A Risk-Balanced Cross-Attention Gradient-Boosted Convolutional Network for Rapid, Interpretable Tuberculosis Screening

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithms are widely used to compute a Nash equilibrium (NE) in two-player zero-sum imperfect-information extensive-form games (IIGs). Among them, Predictive CFR$^+$ (PCFR$^+$) is particularly powerful, achieving an exceptionally fast empirical convergence rate via the prediction in many games. However, the empirical convergence rate of PCFR$^+$ would significantly degrade if the prediction is inaccurate, leading to unstable performance on certain IIGs. To enhance the robustness of PCFR$^+$, we propose Asymmetric PCFR$^+$ (APCFR$^+$), which employs an adaptive asymmetry of step sizes between the updates of implicit and explicit accumulated counterfactual regrets to mitigate the impact of the prediction inaccuracy on convergence. We present a theoretical analysis demonstrating why APCFR$^+$ can enhance the robustness. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the asymmetry of step sizes, a simple yet novel technique that effectively improves the robustness of PCFR$^+$. Then, to reduce the difficulty of implementing APCFR$^+$ caused by the adaptive asymmetry, we propose a simplified version of APCFR$^+$ called Simple APCFR$^+$ (SAPCFR$^+$), which uses a fixed asymmetry of step sizes to enable only a single-line modification compared to original PCFR$^+$. Experimental results on five standard IIG benchmarks and two heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em (HUNL) Subagems show that (i) both APCFR$^+$ and SAPCFR$^+$ outperform PCFR$^+$ in most of the tested games, (ii) SAPCFR$^+$ achieves a comparable empirical convergence rate with APCFR$^+$, and (iii) our approach can be generalized to improve other CFR algorithms, e.g., Discount CFR (DCFR).

Faster Game Solving via Asymmetry of Step Sizes

Time series forecasting is crucial for applications in various domains. Conventional methods often rely on global decomposition into trend, seasonal, and residual components, which become ineffective for real-world series dominated by local, complex, and highly dynamic patterns. Moreover, the high model complexity of such approaches limits their applicability in real-time or resource-constrained environments. In this work, we propose a novel reliability-aware codebook-assisted time series forecasting framework (ReCast) that enables lightweight and robust prediction by exploiting recurring local shapes. ReCast encodes local patterns into discrete embeddings through patch-wise quantization using a learnable codebook, thereby compactly capturing stable regular structures. To compensate for residual variations not preserved by quantization, ReCast employs a dual-path architecture comprising a quantization path for efficient modeling of regular structures and a residual path for reconstructing irregular fluctuations. A central contribution of ReCast is a reliability-aware codebook update strategy, which incrementally refines the codebook via weighted corrections. These correction weights are derived by fusing multiple reliability factors from complementary perspectives by a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) scheme, ensuring adaptability to non-stationarity and robustness to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCast outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability to distribution shifts.

ReCast: Reliability-aware Codebook-assisted Lightweight Time Series Forecasting

Depth super-resolution has achieved impressive performance, and the incorporation of multi-frame information further enhances reconstruction quality. Nevertheless, statistical analyses reveal that video depth super-resolution remains affected by pronounced long-tailed distributions, with the long-tailed effects primarily manifesting in spatial non-smooth regions and temporal variation zones. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal Difference Network (STDNet) comprising two core branches: a spatial difference branch and a temporal difference branch. In the spatial difference branch, we introduce a spatial difference mechanism to mitigate the long-tailed issues in spatial non-smooth regions. This mechanism dynamically aligns RGB features with learned spatial difference representations, enabling intra-frame RGB-D aggregation for depth calibration. In the temporal difference branch, we further design a temporal difference strategy that preferentially propagates temporal variation information from adjacent RGB and depth frames to the current depth frame, leveraging temporal difference representations to achieve precise motion compensation in temporal long-tailed areas. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our STDNet, outperforming existing approaches.

SpatioTemporal Difference Network for Video Depth Super-Resolution

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, which leverages the strengths of both pre-trained language models and external knowledge. While significant progress has been made, the scaling behavior of these approaches during inference remains poorly understood. Towards this end, this paper presents a comprehensive study of inference scaling law for RAG models, which investigates how inference performance scales with respect to key factors including retriever model scale, generator model scale, number of retrieved documents, and context window size. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we establish empirical scaling laws that reveal power-law and sigmoid-type relationships between these factors and performance. We further build a joint inference scaling law with theoretical justification. With the proposed scaling laws, we can understand the performance tendency of RAG models under different computational resources. We believe our insights can pave the way for efficient and effective deployment of RAG models in more applications.

Inference Scaling Law for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Cross-modal retrieval is crucial for discovering latent correspondences across different modalities. However, existing methods typically assume that training data are well-aligned, an unrealistic assumption since real-world datasets inevitably contain noisy correspondences. Many current approaches attempt to handle noise using strategies borrowed from single-modal classification, such as the small-loss trick, to identify clean training pairs. However, our experiments reveal that such small-loss-based strategies are less effective for multi-modal tasks due to the inherent modality gaps. Through comprehensive analysis, we
observe that the deviation directions between paired image-caption
features, termed Sample-level Alignment Drift (SAD), are compact
and data-dependent. Leveraging this discovery, we introduce the Modality Gap Corrected Similarity (MGCS) framework that can more accurately measure the semantic distances of cross-modal samples, dynamically compensating for misalignments. Within MGCS, we can achieve more reliable noisy data separation to promote correct supervision during cross-modal matching model training. Extensive experiments on three widely used noisy correspondence benchmarks demonstrate that MGCS significantly surpasses current state-of-the-art methods.

Noisy Correspondence Learning with Modality Gap Direction Correction

Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from refusal prefixes through humor as an indirect refusal strategy. Rather than explicitly rejecting harmful instructions, HumorReject responds with contextually appropriate humor that naturally defuses potentially dangerous requests. Our approach effectively addresses common "over-defense" issues while demonstrating superior robustness against various attack vectors. Our findings suggest that improvements in training data design can be as important as the alignment algorithm itself in achieving effective LLM safety. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wooozihui/HumorReject.

HumorReject: Decoupling LLM Safety from Refusal Prefix via a Little Humor

In recent years, recommendation systems have evolved from providing a single list of recommendations to offering a comprehensive suite of topic-focused services. To better accomplish this task, conversational recommendation systems (CRS) have progressed from basic retrieval-augmented LLM generation to agentic systems with advanced reasoning and self-correction capabilities. However, agentic systems come with notable response latency—a longstanding challenge for conversational recommendation systems. To balance the trade-off between handling complex queries and minimizing latency, we propose AdaptJobRec, the first conversational job recommendation system that leverages autonomous agent to integrate personalized recommendation algorithm tools. The system employs a user query complexity identification mechanism to minimize response latency. For straightforward queries, the agent directly selects the appropriate tool for rapid responses. For complex queries, the agent uses the memory processing module to filter chat history for relevant content, then passes the results to the intelligent task decomposition planner, and finally executes the tasks using personalized recommendation tools. Evaluation on Walmart’s real-world career recommendation scenarios demonstrates that AdaptJobRec reduces average response latency by up to 53.3\% compared to competitive baselines, while significantly improving recommendation accuracy.

AdaptJobRec: Enhancing Conversational Career Recommendation Through an LLM-Powered Agentic System

There has been a lot of exciting recent progress on new and powerful machine learning algorithms and architectures: how to learn. But for autonomous agents acting in the dynamic, uncertain world, it is at least as important to be able to identify which concepts and subproblems to focus on: what to learn.
This talk presents methods for identifying what to learn within the framework of reinforcement learning, focusing especially on applications in multiagent systems and robotics.

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