Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
type: channel
description: The proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) provides an archival record of the annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which serves as AAAI's primary conference. The meeting provides a forum that promotes theoretical and applied AI research as well as intellectual interchange among researchers and practitioners. The technical papers in the proceedings are selected through a rigorous, blind, peer-review process.
publisher: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
language: en-US
publication name: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
issn: 2159-5399
items: Resource Efficient Sleep Staging via Multi-Level Masking and Prompt Learning
items: AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat Research
items: Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues
items: Modulation-Based Backdoors: Leveraging Amplitude and Frequency Patterns to Attack Speaker Recognition
items: Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Lossless DNA Storage
items: ViG-RAG: Video-aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Temporal and Semantic Hybrid Reasoning
items: Transferable Backdoor Attacks for Code Models via Sharpness-Aware Adversarial Perturbation
items: Toward Multimodal Fake News Detection by Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification
items: RTMol: Rethinking Molecule-text Alignment in a Round-trip View
items: Physical-regularized Hierarchical Generative Model for Metallic Glass Structural Generation and Energy Prediction
items: Regressor-guided Diffusion Model for De Novo Peptide Sequencing with Explicit Mass Control
items: RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment
items: Transferring Causal Driving Patterns for Generalizable Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Based Distillation
items: TRACE: Transformation-Aware Graph Refinement for Reaction Condition Prediction
items: SIDE: Surrogate Conditional Data Extraction from Diffusion Models
items: DyC-STG: Dynamic Causal Spatio-Temporal Graph Network for Real-time Data Credibility Analysis in IoT
items: ProAR: Probabilistic Autoregressive Modeling for Molecular Dynamics
items: Light but Sharp: SlimSTAD for Real-Time Action Detection from Sensor Data
items: VFCionX: Bridging Large and Small Models for Robust Vulnerability-Fixing Commit Identification
items: T2Agent: A Tool-augmented Multimodal Misinformation Detection Agent with Monte Carlo Tree Search
items: Measuring What Matters: Scenario-Driven Evaluation for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Driving
items: DensiCrafter: Physically-Constrained Generation and Fabrication of Self-Supporting Hollow Structures
items: Topology-Enhanced and Label Correlation-Aware Model for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction
items: InteChar: A Unified Oracle Bone Character List for Ancient Chinese Language Modeling
items: NucEL: Single-Nucleotide ELECTRA-Style Genomic Pre-training for Efficient and Interpretable Representations
items: OR-R1: Automating Modeling and Solving of Operations Research Optimization Problem via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning
items: Learning from Long-Term Engagement: Adaptive Tutoring Dialogue Planning for Personalized Education
items: Toward Time-Continuous Data Inference in Sparse Urban CrowdSensing
items: Multi-Horizon Time Series Forecasting of Non-Parametric CDFs with Deep Lattice Networks
items: 3DAlign-DAER: Dynamic Attention Policy and Efficient Retrieval Strategy for Fine-grained 3D-Text Alignment at Scale
items: From Stimuli to Minds: Enhancing Psychological Reasoning in LLMs via Bilateral Reinforcement Learning
items: Unveiling the Attribute Misbinding Threat in Identity-Preserving Models
items: DeepSenseMoE: Harnessing Power of Time Series Foundation Models for Few-Shot Human Activity Recognition
items: RCAFlow: A Workflow-Informed Hierarchical Planning Multi-Agent System for Root Cause Analysis
items: Energy-based Autoregressive Generation for Neural Population Dynamics
items: Failure Localization in Multi-Agent Code Generation via Knowledge-Guided and Transferable Reasoning
items: GARNET: GoT-Based Alert Reduction and Narrative Event Tracing
items: From Passive Perception to Active Memory: A Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization Framework Driven by Coarse-Grained Annotations
items: CHASE: Contextual History for Adaptive and Simple Exploitation in Large Language Model Jailbreaking
items: S²Drug: Bridging Protein Sequence and 3D Structure in Contrastive Representation Learning for Virtual Screening
items: FACTGUARD: Event-Centric and Commonsense-Guided Fake News Detection
items: Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges
items: Directing Uncertainty-Aware Information Flow for Robust Diffusion Prediction
items: Learning Neural Operators from Partial Observations via Latent Autoregressive Modeling
items: VoiceCloak: A Multi-Dimensional Defense Framework Against Unauthorized Diffusion-Based Voice Cloning
items: Transolver Is a Linear Transformer: Revisiting Physics-Attention Through the Lens of Linear Attention
items: Revisiting the Canonicalization for Fast and Accurate Crystal Tensor Property Prediction
items: Towards Distance-Invariant Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Augmented Unsupervised Learning
items: TIDE: Temporal-Aware Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion Transformers in Image Generation
items: Dynamic Geometric Equivariant Network for Full-Atom Antibody Design
items: PanFoMa: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Benchmark for Pan-Cancer
items: Controllable Financial Market Generation with Diffusion Guided Meta Agent
items: Uncovering and Mitigating Destructive Multi-Embedding Attacks in Deepfake Proactive Forensics
items: HyperLoad: A Cross-Modality Enhanced Large Language Model-Based Framework for Green Data Center Cooling Load Prediction
items: RMSAGen: Integrating Multiple Sequence Alignment for Function RNA Design
items: Magnitude-Modulated Equivariant Adapter for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Equivariant Graph Neural Networks
items: FinRpt: Dataset, Evaluation System and LLM-based Multi-agent Framework for Equity Research Report Generation
items: Stochastic Universal Adversarial Perturbations with Fixed Optimization Constraint and Ensured High-probability Transferability
items: SVD-NO: Learning PDE Solution Operators with SVD Integral Kernels
items: Targeted Pathway Inference for Biological Knowledge Bases via Graph Learning and Explanation
items: RLSLM: A Hybrid Framework Combining Reinforcement Learning and a Rule-based Social Locomotion Model for Socially-aware Navigation
items: OneFont: A Unified Agent for End-to-End Font Creation
items: RAG-Enhanced Collaborative LLM Agents for Drug Discovery
items: BugSweeper: Function-Level Detection of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Using Graph Neural Networks
items: Do Large Language Models Think like the Brain? Sentence-Level Evidences from Layer-Wise Embeddings and fMRI
items: Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection
items: anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understanding
items: MetaDiT: Enabling Fine-grained Constraints in High-degree-of Freedom Metasurface Design
items: Scalable Vision-Guided Crop Yield Estimation
items: Learning Cell-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Modal Representations for Robust Molecular Modeling
items: Detecting Fake News in Short Videos Through Multi-View Aggregation
items: WeightFlow: Learning Stochastic Dynamics via Evolving Weight of Neural Network
items: Intention Chain-of-Thought Prompting with Dynamic Routing for Code Generation

Resource Efficient Sleep Staging via Multi-Level Masking and Prompt Learning
type: item
description: Automatic sleep staging plays a vital role in assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. Most existing methods rely heavily on long and continuous EEG recordings, which poses significant challenges for data acquisition in resource-constrained systems, such as wearable or home-based monitoring systems. In this paper, we propose the task of resource-efficient sleep staging, which aims to reduce the amount of signal collected per sleep epoch while maintaining reliable classification performance. To solve this task, we adopt the masking and prompt learning strategy and propose a novel framework called Mask-Aware Sleep Staging (MASS). Specifically, we design a multi-level masking strategy to promote effective feature modeling under partial and irregular observations. To mitigate the loss of contextual information introduced by masking, we further propose a hierarchical prompt learning mechanism that aggregates unmasked data into a global prompt, serving as a semantic anchor for guiding both patch-level and epoch-level feature modeling. MASS is evalutaed on four datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance, especially when the amount of data is very limited. This result highlights its potential for efficient and scalable deployment in real-world low-resource sleep monitoring environments.
creator: Lejun Ai
creator: Yulong Li
creator: Haodong Yi
creator: Jixuan Xie
creator: Yue Wang
creator: Jia Liu
creator: Min Chen
creator: Rui Wang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-17
publication date: 2026-03-17
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 3
ending page: 11
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36958

AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat Research
type: item
description: Generating thorough natural language explanations for threat detections remains an open problem in cybersecurity research, despite significant advances in automated malware detection systems. In this work, we present AutoMalDesc, an automated static analysis summarization framework that, following initial training on a small set of expert-curated examples, operates independently at scale. This approach leverages an iterative self-paced learning pipeline to progressively enhance output quality through synthetic data generation and validation cycles, eliminating the need for extensive manual data annotation. Evaluation across 3,600 diverse samples in five scripting languages demonstrates statistically significant improvements between iterations, showing consistent gains in both summary quality and classification accuracy. Our comprehensive validation approach combines quantitative metrics based on established malware labels with qualitative assessment from both human experts and LLM-based judges, confirming both technical precision and linguistic coherence of generated summaries. To facilitate reproducibility and advance research in this domain, we publish our complete dataset of more than 100K script samples, including annotated seed (900) and test (3.6K) datasets, along with our methodology and evaluation framework.
creator: Alexandru-Mihai Apostu
creator: Andrei Preda
creator: Alexandra Daniela Damir
creator: Diana Bolocan
creator: Radu Tudor Ionescu
creator: Ioana Croitoru
creator: Mihaela Gaman
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 12
ending page: 20
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36959

Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues
type: item
description: Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly text-based, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues. To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources—distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins—for comprehensive toxic speech analysis. Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions. Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.
creator: Zhongjie Ba
creator: Liang Yi
creator: Peng Cheng
creator: Qingcao Li
creator: Qinglong Wang
creator: Li Lu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 21
ending page: 29
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36960

Modulation-Based Backdoors: Leveraging Amplitude and Frequency Patterns to Attack Speaker Recognition
type: item
description: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely and successfully applied in the field of speaker recognition. However, recent studies reveal that these models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries inject malicious behaviors into victim models by poisoning the training process. Existing attack methods often rely on environmental noise or complex voice transformations, which are typically difficult to implement and exhibit poor stealthiness. To address these issues, this paper proposes two modulation-based backdoor attacks that leverage frequency modulation (FM) and amplitude modulation (AM) to construct audio triggers. In real-world scenarios, regular variations in frequency and amplitude are often imperceptible to human listeners, making the proposed attacks more covert. Experimental results show that our methods achieve high attack success rates in both digital and physical settings, while also demonstrating strong resistance to various state-of-the-art backdoor defenses.
creator: Hanbo Cai
creator: Pengcheng Zhang
creator: Yan Xiao
creator: De Li
creator: Hanting Chu
creator: Ying Luo
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 30
ending page: 38
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36961

Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Lossless DNA Storage
type: item
description: This paper presents Reed-Solomon coded single-stranded representation learning (RSRL), a novel end-to-end model for learning representations for lossless DNA data storage. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, RSRL is inspired by both error-correction codec and structural biology. Specifically, RSRL first learns the representations for the subsequent storage from the binary data transformed by the Reed-Solomon codec (RS code). Then, the representations are masked by an RS-code-informed mask to focus on correcting the burst errors occurring in the learning process. The synergy of RS masks and graph attention enables active error localization, breaking through the limitations of traditional passive error correction. With the decoded representations with error corrections, a novel biologically stabilized loss is formulated to regularize the data representations to possess stable single-stranded structures. By incorporating these novel strategies, RSRL can learn highly durable, dense, and lossless representations for subsequent storage tasks in DNA sequences. The proposed RSRL has been compared with a number of baselines in real-world tasks of multi-type data storage. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that RSRL can store diverse types of data with much higher information density and durability, but much lower error rates.
creator: Ben Cao
creator: Xue Li
creator: Tiantian He
creator: Bin Wang
creator: Shihua Zhou
creator: Xiaohu Wu
creator: Qiang Zhang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 39
ending page: 47
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36962

ViG-RAG: Video-aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Temporal and Semantic Hybrid Reasoning
type: item
description: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has greatly improved Large Language Models (LLMs) by adding external knowledge. However, current RAG-based methods face difficulties with long-context video understanding due to two main challenges. First, Current RAG-based methods for long-context video understanding struggle to effectively integrate multimodal and long-range temporal information, resulting in fragmented and context-insensitive knowledge representations. Furthermore, their retrieval mechanisms often rely on static textual matching, failing to dynamically align user queries with the most relevant video segments and leading to suboptimal downstream performance. To overcome these issues, we introduce ViG-RAG, a new framework to enhance long-context video understanding through structured textual knowledge grounding and multi-modal retrieval. Specifically, we segment video transcripts into structured units, extract key entities, form temporal connections, and assign confidence for evidence, enabling coherent long-range reasoning. In this way, it utilizes a knowledge-aware grounding mechanism and a context-aware retrieval process that dynamically builds a probabilistic temporal knowledge graph to organize multi-video content. To improve retrieval accuracy, we propose a hybrid retrieval strategy for semantic and temporal features, with an adaptive distribution modeling the relevance. In this way, it achieves the optimal retrieval distribution for each query, enhancing generation efficiency by reducing unnecessary computations. On top of this, ViG-RAG uses a vision-language model to integrate semantic anchors, expanded contextual fields, and selected video frames, generating an accurate response. We evaluate ViG-RAG on several benchmarks, demonstrating that it significantly surpasses current RAG-based methods.
creator: Zongsheng Cao
creator: Anran Liu
creator: Yangfan He
creator: Jing Li
creator: Bo Zhang
creator: Zigan Wang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 48
ending page: 56
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36963

Transferable Backdoor Attacks for Code Models via Sharpness-Aware Adversarial Perturbation
type: item
description: Code models are increasingly adopted in software development but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned training data. Existing backdoor attacks on code models face a fundamental trade-off between transferability and stealthiness. Static trigger-based attacks insert fixed dead code patterns that transfer well across models and datasets but are easily detected by code-specific defenses. In contrast, dynamic trigger-based attacks adaptively generate context-aware triggers to evade detection but suffer from poor cross-dataset transferability. Moreover, they rely on unrealistic assumptions of identical data distributions between poisoned and victim training data, limiting their practicality. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sharpness-aware Transferable Adversarial Backdoor (STAB), a novel attack that achieves both transferability and stealthiness without requiring complete victim data. STAB is motivated by the observation that adversarial perturbations in flat regions of the loss landscape transfer more effectively across datasets than those in sharp minima. To this end, we train a surrogate model using Sharpness-Aware Minimization to guide model parameters toward flat loss regions, and employ Gumbel-Softmax optimization to enable differentiable search over discrete trigger tokens for generating context-aware adversarial triggers. Experiments across three datasets and two code models show that STAB outperforms prior attacks in terms of transferability and stealthiness. It achieves a 73.2% average attack success rate after defense, outperforming static trigger–based attacks that fail under defense. STAB also surpasses the best dynamic trigger–based attack by 12.4% in cross-dataset attack success rate and maintains performance on clean inputs.
creator: Shuyu Chang
creator: Haiping Huang
creator: Yanjun Zhang
creator: Yujin Huang
creator: Fu Xiao
creator: Leo Yu Zhang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 57
ending page: 65
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36964

Toward Multimodal Fake News Detection by Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification
type: item
description: The rapid proliferation of social media platforms has led to a surge in multimodal fake news, where deceptive content often combines text and images to mislead audiences. Traditional unimodal detection methods struggle to address the complexity of such content, necessitating holistic multimodal approaches. While the latest advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for enhancing detection performance by analyzing multi-dimensional features, including source credibility, cross-modal contradictions, emotional bias, and manipulative writing patterns, these methods suffer from a key flaw: a susceptibility to hallucinations or erroneous reasoning, which can lead to flawed conclusions and ultimately biased detection results. We propose the Multimodal Fake News Detection via Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification (MMRGV) model to mitigate this challenge. Our method employs a cross-verification mechanism to screen and reconcile contradictions among different rationales, thereby preserving the LLM's analytical advantages while mitigating the impact of erroneous reasoning or hallucinations on the final detection. Subsequently, these optimized rationales are fused via an adaptive weighting strategy to output a robust final prediction. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and GossipCop) demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy of 0.9972, 0.9663, and 0.8772, respectively, and significantly outperforming existing baselines. These results validate the effectiveness of multi-perspective rationale generation and cross-verification in enhancing multimodal fake news detection, offering a resilient solution to combat misinformation in the era of generative AI.
creator: Junyang Chen
creator: Yueqian Li
creator: Ka Chung Ng
creator: Huan Wang
creator: Liang-Jie Zhang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 66
ending page: 74
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36965

RTMol: Rethinking Molecule-text Alignment in a Round-trip View
type: item
description: Aligning molecular sequence representations (e.g., SMILES notations) with textual descriptions is critical for applications spanning drug discovery, materials design, and automated chemical literature analysis. Existing methodologies typically treat molecular captioning (molecule-to-text) and text-based molecular design (text-to-molecule) as separate tasks, relying on supervised fine-tuning or contrastive learning pipelines. These approaches face three key limitations: (i) conventional metrics like BLEU prioritize linguistic fluency over chemical accuracy, (ii) training datasets frequently contain chemically ambiguous narratives with incomplete specifications, and (iii) independent optimization of generation directions leads to bidirectional inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose RTMol, a bidirectional alignment framework that unifies molecular captioning and text-to-SMILES generation through self-supervised round-trip learning. The framework introduces novel round-trip evaluation metrics and enables unsupervised training for molecular captioning without requiring paired molecule-text corpora. Experiments demonstrate that RTMol enhances bidirectional alignment performance by up to 47% across various LLMs, establishing an effective paradigm for joint molecule-text understanding and generation.
creator: Letian Chen
creator: Runhan Shi
creator: Gufeng Yu
creator: Yang Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 75
ending page: 82
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36966

Physical-regularized Hierarchical Generative Model for Metallic Glass Structural Generation and Energy Prediction
type: item
description: Disordered materials such as glasses, unlike crystals, lack long‑range atomic order and have no periodic unit cells, yielding a high‑dimensional configuration space with widely varying properties. The complexity not only increases computational costs for atomistic simulations but also makes it difficult for generative AI models to deliver accurate property predictions and realistic structure generation. In this work, we introduce GlassVAE, a hierarchical graph variational autoencoder that uses graph representations to learn compact, translation‑, and permutation‑invariant embeddings of atomic configurations. The resulting structured latent space not only enables efficient generation of novel, physically plausible structures but also supports exploration of the glass energy landscape. To enforce structural realism and physical fidelity, we augment GlassVAE with two physics‑informed regularizers: a radial distribution function (RDF) loss that captures characteristic short‑ and medium‑range ordering and an energy regression loss that reflects the broad configurational energetics. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results highlight the critical impact of these regularizers. By encoding high‑dimensional atomistic data into a compact latent vector and decoding it into structures with accurate energy predictions, GlassVAE provides a fast, physics‑aware path for modeling and designing disordered materials.
creator: Qiyuan Chen
creator: Ajay Annamareddy
creator: Ying-Fei Li
creator: Dane Morgan
creator: Bu Wang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 83
ending page: 91
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36967

Regressor-guided Diffusion Model for De Novo Peptide Sequencing with Explicit Mass Control
type: item
description: The discovery of novel proteins relies on sensitive protein identification, for which de novo peptide sequencing (DNPS) from mass spectra is a crucial approach. While deep learning has advanced DNPS, existing models inadequately enforce the fundamental mass consistency constraint—that a predicted peptide's mass must match the experimental measured precursor mass. Previous DNPS methods often treat this critical information as a simple input feature or use it in post-processing, leading to numerous implausible predictions that do not adhere to this fundamental physical property. To address this limitation, we introduce DiffuNovo, a novel regressor-guided diffusion model for de novo peptide sequencing that provides explicit peptide-level mass control. Our approach integrates the mass constraint at two critical stages: during training, a novel peptide-level mass loss guides model optimization, while at inference, regressor-based guidance from gradient-based updates in the latent space steers the generation to compel the predicted peptide adheres to the mass constraint. Comprehensive evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate that DiffuNovo surpasses state-of-the-art methods in DNPS accuracy. Additionally, as the first DNPS model to employ a diffusion model as its core backbone, DiffuNovo leverages the powerful controllability of diffusion architecture and achieves a significant reduction in mass error, thereby producing much more physically plausible peptides. These innovations represent a substantial advancement toward robust and broadly applicable DNPS. The source code is available in the supplementary material.
creator: Shaorong Chen
creator: Jingbo Zhou
creator: Jun Xia
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 92
ending page: 100
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36968

RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment
type: item
description: Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience, make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team decision-support tool designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to facilitate further research in this field.
creator: Xuanzhong Chen
creator: Ye Jin
creator: Xiaohao Mao
creator: Lun Wang
creator: Shuyang Zhang
creator: Ting Chen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 101
ending page: 109
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36969

Transferring Causal Driving Patterns for Generalizable Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Based Distillation
type: item
description: Traffic simulation is essential for validating the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems, yet data-driven simulation methods often struggle with distribution shifts, limiting their generalizability across diverse datasets (domains). To address this, we present Causal Driving Pattern Transfer (CDPT), a novel two-stage knowledge distillation framework built upon diffusion model to enhance cross-domain generalizability. In Phase I, we implement hybrid self-distillation within the source domain by integrating feature-, response-, and contrastive-level distillation, which enables the model to decompose complex driving behaviors into their core causal components, including scene-conditioned driven patterns, multi-agent interaction dynamics and casual saliency. In Phase II, we introduce a continual distillation strategy: few-shot samples from the target domain are used to initiate generation of diverse synthetic scenarios, allowing the student model to continually adapt to novel environments without retraining on large-scale data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDPT achieves strong generalization in both open-loop and closed-loop simulations, effectively generating realistic, interaction-aware behaviors that are critical for scalable and reliable autonomous driving testing.
creator: Yuhang Chen
creator: Jie Sun
creator: Jialin Fan
creator: Jian Sun
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 110
ending page: 118
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36970

TRACE: Transformation-Aware Graph Refinement for Reaction Condition Prediction
type: item
description: Identifying suitable reaction conditions is critical for chemical synthesis, as they directly affect yield, selectivity, and transformation feasibility. While recent methods have shown promising results, most approaches either encode reactants and products independently or rely on rule-based reaction graphs, both of which constrain the ability of the model to capture condition-relevant structural transformations. In this work, we propose TRACE, a transformation-aware graph refinement framework for reaction condition prediction. TRACE constructs atom-level joint graphs that integrate both reactant and product structures to represent condition-relevant transformations. A structure-aware encoder enriches atom features with local chemical context, followed by a dynamic interaction refinement module that adaptively infers task-specific edges. To further guide the model toward condition-relevant patterns, a mechanism regularized graph encoder incorporates reaction center information, enabling more accurate modeling of transformation mechanisms. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that TRACE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple condition types. The integration of transformation-aware refinement leads to improvements in prediction accuracy and generalization, while maintaining robust performance in challenging and realistic synthesis planning scenarios.
creator: Yujie Chen
creator: Tengfei Ma
creator: Yuansheng Liu
creator: Leyi Wei
creator: Shu Wu
creator: Dongsheng Cao
creator: Yiping Liu
creator: Xiangxiang Zeng
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 119
ending page: 127
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36971

SIDE: Surrogate Conditional Data Extraction from Diffusion Models
type: item
description: As diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) become central to Generative AI (GenAI), understanding their memorization behavior is essential for evaluating risks such as data leakage, copyright infringement, and trustworthiness. While prior research finds conditional DPMs highly susceptible to data extraction attacks using explicit prompts, unconditional models are often assumed to be safe. We challenge this view by introducing Surrogate condItional Data Extraction (SIDE), a general framework that constructs data-driven surrogate conditions to enable targeted extraction from any DPM. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA, ImageNet, and LAION-5B, we show that SIDE can successfully extract training data from so-called safe unconditional models, outperforming baseline attacks even on conditional models. Complementing these findings, we present a unified theoretical framework based on informative labels, demonstrating that all forms of conditioning, explicit or surrogate, amplify memorization. Our work redefines the threat landscape for DPMs, establishing precise conditioning as a fundamental vulnerability and setting a new, stronger benchmark for model privacy evaluation.
creator: Yunhao Chen
creator: Shujie Wang
creator: Difan Zou
creator: Xingjun Ma
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 128
ending page: 136
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36972

DyC-STG: Dynamic Causal Spatio-Temporal Graph Network for Real-time Data Credibility Analysis in IoT
type: item
description: The wide spreading of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors generates vast spatio-temporal data streams, but ensuring data credibility is a critical yet unsolved challenge for applications like smart homes. While spatio-temporal graph (STG) models are a leading paradigm for such data, they often fall short in dynamic, human-centric environments due to two fundamental limitations: (1) their reliance on static graph topologies, which fail to capture physical, event-driven dynamics, and (2) their tendency to confuse spurious correlations with true causality, undermining robustness in human-centric environments. To address these gaps, we propose the Dynamic Causal Spatio-Temporal Graph Network (DyC-STG), a novel framework designed for real-time data credibility analysis in IoT. Our framework features two synergistic contributions: an event-driven dynamic graph module that adapts the graph topology in real-time to reflect physical state changes, and a causal reasoning module to distill causally-aware representations by strictly enforcing temporal precedence. To facilitate the research in this domain we release two new real-world datasets. Comprehensive experiments show that DyC-STG establishes a new state-of-the-art, outperforming the strongest baselines by 1.4 percentage points and achieving an F1-Score of up to 0.930.
creator: Guanjie Cheng
creator: Boyi Li
creator: Peihan Wu
creator: Feiyi Chen
creator: Xinkui Zhao
creator: Mengying Zhu
creator: Shuiguang Deng
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 137
ending page: 146
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36973

ProAR: Probabilistic Autoregressive Modeling for Molecular Dynamics
type: item
description: Understanding the structural dynamics of biomolecules is crucial for uncovering biological functions. As molecular dynamics (MD) simulation data becomes more available, deep generative models have been developed to synthesize realistic MD trajectories. However, existing methods produce fixed-length trajectories by jointly denoising high-dimensional spatiotemporal representations, which conflicts with MD’s frame-by-frame integration process and fails to capture time-dependent conformational diversity. Inspired by MD's sequential nature, we introduce a new probabilistic autoregressive (ProAR) framework for trajectory generation. ProAR uses a dual-network system that models each frame as a multivariate Gaussian distribution and employs an anti-drifting sampling strategy to reduce cumulative errors. This approach captures conformational uncertainty and time-coupled structural changes while allowing flexible generation of trajectories of arbitrary length. Experiments on ATLAS, a large-scale protein MD dataset, demonstrate that for long trajectory generation, our model achieves a 7.5% reduction in reconstruction RMSE and an average 25.8% improvement in conformation change accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. For conformation sampling task, it performs comparably to specialized time-independent models, providing a flexible and dependable alternative to standard MD simulations.
creator: Kaiwen Cheng
creator: Yutian Liu
creator: Zhiwei Nie
creator: Mujie Lin
creator: Yanzhen Hou
creator: Yiheng Tao
creator: Chang Liu
creator: Jie Chen
creator: Youdong Mao
creator: Yonghong Tian
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 147
ending page: 155
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36974

Light but Sharp: SlimSTAD for Real-Time Action Detection from Sensor Data
type: item
description: Sensory Temporal Action Detection (STAD) aims to localize and classify human actions within long, untrimmed sequences captured by non-visual sensors such as WiFi or inertial measurement units (IMUs). Unlike video-based TAD, STAD poses unique challenges due to the low-dimensional, noisy, and heterogeneous nature of sensory data, as well as the real-time and resource constraints on edge devices. While recent STAD models have improved detection performance, their high computational cost hampers practical deployment. In this paper, we propose SlimSTAD, a simple yet effective framework that achieves both high accuracy and low latency for STAD. SlimSTAD features a novel Decoupled Channel Modeling (DCM) encoder, which preserves modality-specific temporal features and enables efficient inter-channel aggregation via lightweight graph attention. An anchor-free cascade predictor then refines action boundaries and class predictions in a two-stage design without dense proposals. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that SlimSTAD outperforms strong video-derived and sensory baselines by an average of 2.1 mAP, while significantly reducing GFLOPs, parameters, and latency, validating its effectiveness for real-world, edge-aware STAD deployment.
creator: Wei Cui
creator: Lukai Fan
creator: Zhenghua Chen
creator: Min Wu
creator: Shili Xiang
creator: Haixia Wang
creator: Bing Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 156
ending page: 165
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36975

VFCionX: Bridging Large and Small Models for Robust Vulnerability-Fixing Commit Identification
type: item
description: Vulnerability-Fixing Commit Identification(VFCI) is a critical task in software security maintenance that aims to automatically identify code commits that patch security vulnerabilities. However, existing approaches face challenges in handling low-quality commit messages and entangled commits, which limit their identification performance. To address these issues, we propose VFCionX, a novel VFCI framework that integrates large and small language models in a collaborative architecture. VFCionX consists of three core modules: Message Classifier, Patch Classifier, and Ensemble Classifier. The Message Classifier employs a multi-source contextual augmentation strategy to enhance the quality of commit messages and fine-tunes the Qwen2.5-1.5B model, significantly improving classification performance in the textual modality. The Patch Classifier combines heuristic rules with a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-driven file selector to filter noise from entangled commits, and incorporates a line-level feature extractor based on CodeBERT and CNN to capture local pattern differences between added and deleted code lines. The Ensemble Classifier integrates predictions from both channels using the AdaBoost algorithm, enhancing model robustness and generalization. Experimental results on five popular C/C++ repositories comprising 24,630 commits show that VFCionX achieves an F1-score of 81.47%, outperforming the best baseline by 9.42%. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component, while sensitivity analysis reveals optimal parameter settings for balancing performance and noise resilience. This work provides a new and effective solution for robust vulnerability patch identification.
creator: Xing Cui
creator: Jingzheng Wu
creator: Wenxiang Ou
creator: Tianyue Luo
creator: Zhiyuan Li
creator: Xiang Ling
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 166
ending page: 174
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36976

T2Agent: A Tool-augmented Multimodal Misinformation Detection Agent with Monte Carlo Tree Search
type: item
description: Real-world multimodal misinformation often arises from mixed forgery sources, requiring dynamic reasoning and adaptive verification. However, existing methods mainly rely on static pipelines and limited tool usage, limiting their ability to handle such complexity and diversity. To address this challenge, we propose T2Agent, a novel misinformation detection agent that incorporates an extensible toolkit with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). The toolkit consists of modular tools such as web search, forgery detection, and consistency analysis. Each tool is described using standardized templates, enabling seamless integration and future expansion. To avoid inefficiency from using all tools simultaneously, a greedy search-based selector is proposed to identify a task-relevant subset. This subset then serves as the action space for MCTS to dynamically collect evidence and perform multi-source verification. To better align MCTS with the multi-source nature of misinformation detection, T2Agent extends traditional MCTS with multi-source verification, which decomposes the task into coordinated subtasks targeting different forgery sources. A dual reward mechanism containing a reasoning trajectory score and a confidence score is further proposed to encourage a balance between exploration across mixed forgery sources and exploitation for more reliable evidence. We conduct ablation studies to confirm the effectiveness of the tree search mechanism and tool usage. Extensive experiments further show that T2Agent consistently outperforms existing baselines on challenging mixed-source multimodal misinformation benchmarks, demonstrating its strong potential as a training-free detector.
creator: Xing Cui
creator: Yueying Zou
creator: Zekun Li
creator: Peipei Li
creator: Xinyuan Xu
creator: Xuannan Liu
creator: Huaibo Huang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 175
ending page: 183
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36977

Measuring What Matters: Scenario-Driven Evaluation for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Driving
type: item
description: Being able to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents is essential for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems in dynamic situations. While various methods have been proposed for trajectory prediction, the current evaluation practices still rely on error-based metrics (e.g., ADE, FDE), which reveal the accuracy from a post-hoc view but ignore the actual effect the predictor brings to the self-driving vehicles (SDVs), especially in complex interactive scenarios: a high-quality predictor not only chases accuracy, but should also captures all possible directions a neighbor agent might move, to support the SDVs' cautious decision-making. Given that the existing metrics hardly account for this standard, in our work, we propose a comprehensive pipeline that adaptively evaluates the predictor's performance by two dimensions: accuracy and diversity. Based on the criticality of the driving scenario, these two dimensions are dynamically combined and result in a final score for the predictor's performance. Extensive experiments on a closed-loop benchmark using a real-world dataset show that our pipeline yields a more reasonable evaluation than traditional metrics by better reflecting the correlation of the predictors' evaluation with the autonomous vehicles' driving performance. This evaluation pipeline shows a robust way to select a predictor that potentially contributes most to the SDV's driving performance.
creator: Longchao Da
creator: David Isele
creator: Hua Wei
creator: Manish Saroya
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 184
ending page: 192
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36978

DensiCrafter: Physically-Constrained Generation and Fabrication of Self-Supporting Hollow Structures
type: item
description: The rise of 3D generative models has enabled automatic 3D geometry and texture synthesis from multimodal inputs (e.g., text or images). However, these methods often ignore physical constraints and manufacturability considerations. In this work, we address the challenge of producing 3D designs that are both lightweight and self-supporting. We present DensiCrafter, a framework for generating lightweight, self-supporting 3D hollow structures by optimizing the density field. Starting from coarse voxel grids produced by Trellis, we interpret these as continuous density fields to optimize and introduce three differentiable, physically constrained, and simulation-free loss terms. Additionally, a mass regularization penalizes unnecessary material, while a restricted optimization domain preserves the outer surface. Our method seamlessly integrates with pretrained Trellis-based models (e.g., Trellis, DSO) without any architectural changes. In extensive evaluations, we achieve up to 43% reduction in material mass on the text-to-3D task. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method could improve the stability and maintain high geometric fidelity. Real-world 3D-printing experiments confirm that our hollow designs can be reliably fabricated and could be self-supporting.
creator: Shengqi Dang
creator: Fu Chai
creator: Jiaxin Li
creator: Chao Yuan
creator: Wei Ye
creator: Nan Cao
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 193
ending page: 201
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36979

Topology-Enhanced and Label Correlation-Aware Model for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction
type: item
description: Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) prediction is crucial for understanding cellular functions and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning–based methods primarily rely on direct interaction within the PPI network to update protein representations. However, (1) such networks overlook the potential associations between functionally similar proteins, limiting the smoothing capability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in learning representations for similar nodes. (2) Additionally, most approaches fail to adequately model the latent dependencies among interaction types (edge labels), which hinders their performance in PPI prediction tasks. To address these limitations, we propose TELC-PPI, a topology-enhanced and label correlation-aware model for protein-protein interactions prediction. Specifically, TELC-PPI first identifies similar proteins by leveraging both the topological information of the PPI network and the label distributions of nodes, constructing similarity edges. Then, it incorporates label co-occurrence statistics into the learning of label embeddings. Experimental results on multiple datasets and under various data split settings demonstrate that TELC-PPI significantly outperforms existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our model design.
creator: Bin Deng
creator: Huifang Ma
creator: Ruijia Zhang
creator: Meihuizi Jia
creator: Rui Bing
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 202
ending page: 210
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36980

InteChar: A Unified Oracle Bone Character List for Ancient Chinese Language Modeling
type: item
description: Constructing historical language models (LMs) plays a crucial role in aiding archaeological provenance studies and understanding ancient cultures. However, existing resources present major challenges for training effective LMs on historical texts. First, the scarcity of historical language samples renders unsupervised learning approaches based on large text corpora highly inefficient, hindering effective pre-training. Moreover, due to the considerable temporal gap and complex evolution of ancient scripts, the absence of comprehensive character encoding schemes limits the digitization and computational processing of ancient texts, particularly in early Chinese writing. To address these challenges, we introduce InteChar, a unified and extensible character list that integrates unencoded oracle bone characters with traditional and modern Chinese. InteChar enables consistent digitization and representation of historical texts, providing a foundation for robust modeling of ancient scripts. To evaluate the effectiveness of InteChar, we construct the Oracle Corpus Set (OracleCS), an ancient Chinese corpus that combines expert-annotated samples with LLM-assisted data augmentation, centered on Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. Extensive experiments show that models trained with InteChar on OracleCS achieve substantial improvements across various historical language understanding tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our approach and establishing a solid foundation for future research in ancient Chinese NLP.
creator: Xiaolei Diao
creator: Zhihan Zhou
creator: Lida Shi
creator: Ting Wang
creator: Ruihua Qi
creator: Daqian Shi
creator: Hao Xu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 211
ending page: 219
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36981

NucEL: Single-Nucleotide ELECTRA-Style Genomic Pre-training for Efficient and Interpretable Representations
type: item
description: Pre-training large language models on genomic sequences has become a powerful approach for learning biologically meaningful representations. While masked language modeling (MLM)-based approaches, such as DNABERT and Nucleotide Transformer (NT), achieve strong performance, they are hindered by inefficiencies due to partial token supervision, pre-training/fine-tuning mismatches, and high computational costs. We introduce NucEL, the first ELECTRA-style pre-training framework for genomic foundation models, which overcomes these challenges. Through a discriminator network identifying tokens modified by a generator, NucEL achieves comprehensive token-level supervision across all sequence positions, thereby markedly improving training efficiency relative to the partial supervision of masked positions inherent in MLM frameworks. By integrating ModernBERT’s architectural advancements, including hybrid local-global attention and flash attention mechanisms, NucEL establishes an optimized BERT architecture for genomic sequence modeling. Unlike traditional methods that tokenize genomic sequences into 6-mers, NucEL implements single-nucleotide tokenization, enabling fine-grained resolution and improving both efficiency and interpretability. Pre-trained on the human genome only, NucEL achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets across diverse downstream tasks in both human and non-human species, including regulatory element identification (e.g., promoters, enhancers), transcription factor binding prediction in human and mouse, open chromatin region classification, and histone modification profiles, surpassing MLM-based models of similar size and rivaling models 25 times larger, such as NT. Ablation studies provide critical insights into tokenization and masking strategies, optimizing ELECTRA-style pretraining for DNA sequences. Attention analyses reveal NucEL’s superior ability to capture biologically relevant sequence motifs compared to NT, offering valuable insig…
creator: Ke Ding
creator: Brian Parker
creator: Jiayu Wen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 220
ending page: 227
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36982

OR-R1: Automating Modeling and Solving of Operations Research Optimization Problem via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning
type: item
description: Optimization modeling and solving are fundamental to the application of Operations Research (OR) in real-world decision making, yet the process of translating natural language problem descriptions into formal models and solver code remains highly expertise intensive. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automation, the generalization ability and data efficiency of existing LLM-based methods are still limited, asmost require vast amounts of annotated or synthetic data, resulting in high costs and scalability barriers. In this work, we present OR-R1, a data-efficient training framework for automated optimization modeling and solving. OR-R1 first employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to help the model acquire the essential reasoning patterns for problem formulation and code generation from limited labeled data. In addition, it improves the capability and consistency through Test-Time Group Relative Policy Optimization (TGRPO). This two-stage design enables OR-R1 to leverage both scarce labeled and abundant unlabeled data for effective learning. Experiments show that OR-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average solving accuracy of 67.7%, using only 1/10 the synthetic data required by prior methods such as ORLM, exceeding ORLM’s solving accuracy by up to 4.2%. Remarkably, OR-R1 outperforms ORLM by over 2.4% with just 100 synthetic samples. Furthermore, TGRPO contributes an additional 3.1%–6.4% improvement in accuracy, significantly narrowing the gap between single-attempt (Pass@1) and multi-attempt (Pass@8) performance from 13% to 7%. Extensive evaluations across diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate that OR-R1 provides a robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution for automated OR optimization problem modeling and solving, lowering the expertise and data barriers for industrial OR applications.
creator: Zezhen Ding
creator: Zhen Tan
creator: Jiheng Zhang
creator: Tianlong Chen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 228
ending page: 236
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36983

Learning from Long-Term Engagement: Adaptive Tutoring Dialogue Planning for Personalized Education
type: item
description: With the advancements of large language models (LLMs), intelligent tutoring systems have witnessed significant progress. The extensive knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs enable intelligent tutoring systems to generate more helpful tutoring dialogues with scaffolding instructions. However, these systems fail to provide scaffolds that align with the personalized needs of students due to the lack of attention to the long-term learning process of students. Meanwhile, the pursuit of more suitable scaffolds through complex reasoning may result in additional computational overhead. To address these issues, we propose LEAP, a Long-term Educational Adaptive Planning system that can model students' long-term learning process. Specifically, LEAP plans for scaffolds through collaboration of direct planning and thoughtful reasoning to improve efficiency and captures students' long-term learning progress through cognitive state extraction. Then we propose LEAD, a Long-term Educational Archive Dataset to alleviate the lack of data and validate the effectiveness of LEAP, which is constructed through real-world students' reactions and simulation of the teacher-student interactions. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LEAP.
creator: Zhiang Dong
creator: Zhenlong Dai
creator: Xiangwei Lv
creator: Jingyuan Chen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 237
ending page: 245
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36984

Toward Time-Continuous Data Inference in Sparse Urban CrowdSensing
type: item
description: Sparse Urban CrowdSensing (Sparse UCS) is a practical paradigm for completing full sensing maps from limited observations. However, existing methods typically rely on a time-discrete assumption, where data is considered static within fixed intervals. This simplification introduces significant errors as real-world data changes continuously. To address this, we propose a framework for time-continuous data completion. Our approach, Time-Aware Mamba-based Deep Matrix Factorization (TIME-DMF), leverages the Mamba architecture as a powerful temporal encoder. Crucially, we enhance Mamba with a novel time-aware mechanism that explicitly incorporates the actual, often irregular, physical time intervals between observations into its state transitions. This allows our model to accurately capture true temporal dynamics and generate high-fidelity data for any queried moment in time through a query-generate mechanism. Extensive experiments on five diverse sensing tasks demonstrate that TIME-DMF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the superiority of the time-continuous paradigm for Sparse UCS.
creator: Hao Du
creator: Wenbin Liu
creator: Ziyu Sun
creator: Haoyang Su
creator: En Wang
creator: Yuanbo Xu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 246
ending page: 254
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36985

Multi-Horizon Time Series Forecasting of Non-Parametric CDFs with Deep Lattice Networks
type: item
description: Probabilistic forecasting is not only a way to add more information to a prediction of the future, but it also builds on weaknesses in point prediction. Sudden changes in a time series can still be captured by a cumulative distribution function (CDF), while a point prediction is likely to miss it entirely. The modeling of CDFs within forecasts has historically been limited to parametric approaches, but due to recent advances, this no longer has to be the case. We aim to advance the fields of probabilistic forecasting and monotonic networks by connecting them and propose an approach that permits the forecasting of implicit, complete, and nonparametric CDFs. For this purpose, we propose an adaptation to deep lattice networks (DLN) for monotonically constrained simultaneous/implicit quantile regression in time series forecasting. Quantile regression usually produces quantile crossovers, which need to be prevented to achieve a legitimate CDF. By leveraging long short term memory units (LSTM) as the embedding layer, and spreading quantile inputs to all sub-lattices of a DLN with an extended output size, we can produce a multi-horizon forecast of an implicit CDF due to the monotonic constraintability of DLNs that prevent quantile crossovers. We compare and evaluate our approach's performance to relevant state of the art within the context of a highly relevant application of time series forecasting: Day-ahead, hourly forecasts of solar irradiance observations. Our experiments show that the adaptation of a DLN performs just as well or even better than an unconstrained approach. Further comparison of the adapted DLN against a scalable monotonic neural network shows that our approach performs better. With this adaptation of DLNs, we intend to create more interest and crossover investigations in techniques of monotonic neural networks and probabilistic forecasting.
creator: Niklas Erdmann
creator: Lars Bentsen
creator: Roy Stenbro
creator: Heine Nygard Riise
creator: Narada Dilp Warakagoda
creator: Paal E. Engelstad
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 255
ending page: 264
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36986

3DAlign-DAER: Dynamic Attention Policy and Efficient Retrieval Strategy for Fine-grained 3D-Text Alignment at Scale
type: item
description: Despite recent advancements in 3D-text cross-modal alignment, existing state-of-the-art methods still struggle to align fine-grained textual semantics with detailed geometric structures, and their alignment performance degrades significantly when scaling to large-scale 3D databases. To overcome this limitation, we introduce 3DAlign-DAER, a unified framework designed to align text and 3D geometry via the proposed dynamic attention policy and the efficient retrieval strategy, capturing subtle correspondences for diverse cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks. Specifically, during the training, our proposed dynamic attention policy (DAP) employs the Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to represent the alignment as learnable fine-grained token-to-point attentions. To optimize these attentions across different tasks and geometric hierarchies, our DAP further exploits the Monte Carlo tree search to dynamically calibrate HAF attention weights via a hybrid reward signal and further enhances the alignment between textual descriptions and local 3D geometry. During the inference, our 3DAlign-DAER introduces an Efficient Retrieval Strategy (ERS) to leverage efficient hierarchical searching in the large-scale embedding spaces, outperforming traditional methods (eg, KNN) in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate text-3D alignment research and train our 3DAlign-DAER, we construct Align3D-2M, a large-scale dataset featuring 2M text-3D pairs, to provide sufficient fine-grained cross-modal annotations. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our 3DAlign-DAER on diverse benchmarks.
creator: Yijia Fan
creator: Jusheng Zhang
creator: Kaitong Cai
creator: Jing Yang
creator: Jian Wang
creator: Keze Wang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 265
ending page: 273
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36987

From Stimuli to Minds: Enhancing Psychological Reasoning in LLMs via Bilateral Reinforcement Learning
type: item
description: Large Language Models show promise in emotion understanding, social reasoning, and empathy, yet struggle with psychologically grounded tasks requiring inference of implicit mental states in complex, socially and contextually ambiguous settings. These limitations stem from lacking theory-aligned supervision and difficulty capturing nuanced mental processes in real-world narratives. To bridge this gap, we leverage expert-labeled scenarios and propose a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning framework imitating expert psychological reasoning. By integrating real-world stimuli with structured reasoning guidance, our approach enables compact models to internalize social-cognitive principles, perform nuanced inference, and support continual self-improvement. Experiments across benchmarks show expert-level interpretive capability across psychological tasks.
creator: Yichao Feng
creator: Haoran Luo
creator: Lang Feng
creator: Shuai Zhao
creator: Anh Tuan Luu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 274
ending page: 282
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36988

Unveiling the Attribute Misbinding Threat in Identity-Preserving Models
type: item
description: Identity-preserving models have led to notable progress in generating personalized content. Unfortunately, such models also exacerbate risks when misused, for instance, by generating threatening content targeting specific individuals. This paper introduces the Attribute Misbinding Attack, a novel method that poses a threat to identity-preserving models by inducing them to produce Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. The attack's core idea involves crafting benign-looking textual prompts to circumvent text-filter safeguards and leverage a key model vulnerability: flawed attribute binding that stems from its internal attention bias. This results in misattributing harmful descriptions to a target identity and generating NSFW outputs. To facilitate the study of this attack, we present the Misbinding Prompt evaluation set, which examines the content generation risks of current state-of-the-art identity-preserving models across four risk dimensions: pornography, violence, discrimination, and illegality. Additionally, we introduce the Attribute Binding Safety Score (ABSS), a metric for concurrently assessing both content fidelity and safety compliance. Experimental results show that our Misbinding Prompt evaluation set achieves a 5.28 % higher success rate in bypassing five leading text filters (including GPT-4o) compared to existing main-stream evaluation sets, while also demonstrating the highest proportion of NSFW content generation. The proposed ABSS metric enables a more comprehensive evaluation of identity-preserving models by concurrently assessing both content fidelity and safety compliance.
creator: Junming Fu
creator: Jishen Zeng
creator: Yi Jiang
creator: Peiyu Zhuang
creator: Baoying Chen
creator: Siyu Lu
creator: Jianquan Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 283
ending page: 291
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36989

DeepSenseMoE: Harnessing Power of Time Series Foundation Models for Few-Shot Human Activity Recognition
type: item
description: Recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have fundamentally revolutionized general time series analysis across domains like finance, retail, weather, and power. However, how to unlock the hidden capacity of general-purpose TSFMs for wearable activity recognition still remains largely unexplored, given severe sensor annotation scarcity and highly heterogeneous sensor data. To address these challenges, we propose DeepSenseMoE—a novel multi-scale convolution-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of general-purpose TSFMs to sensor-based activity recognition. DeepSenseMoE integrates three key innovations: (1) Multi-scale convolutional experts with different filter sizes responsible for capturing varying sensor contexts; (2) Shared-expert isolation mechanism compressing common activity knowledge into a single shared expert while reducing redundancy among routed experts; and (3) Hierarchical supervised contrastive alignment guiding experts to further learn discriminative activity features. Extensive experiments on three challenging HAR benchmarks demonstrate DeepSenseMoE's superiority, achieving up to 9.5% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art under few-shot and full-supervised settings, with only <1% additional trainable parameters. We hope that this work may establish a solid foundation to accelerate development and deployment of powerful TSFMs in data-scarce wearable activity recognition tasks while reducing the reliance on labeled sensor data.
creator: Zenan Fu
creator: Dongzhou Cheng
creator: Lei Zhang
creator: Wenbo Huang
creator: Zhenghao Chen
creator: Hao Wu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 292
ending page: 299
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36990

RCAFlow: A Workflow-Informed Hierarchical Planning Multi-Agent System for Root Cause Analysis
type: item
description: As microservice architectures become increasingly complex and system events become more frequent, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has emerged as a critical task to ensure system reliability. However, existing deep learning-based methods often struggle with limited flexibility and a lack of interpretability when addressing complex system failures. Recent efforts to integrate large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in enhancing diagnostic transparency and reasoning capability. However, expansive search spaces, intricate workflows, and entangled constraints constrain practical adoption. We propose RCAFlow, a multi-agent framework that integrates structured workflow knowledge with hierarchical planning to address these challenges. RCAFlow transforms semi-structured documents into behavior tree-style workflows to support interpretable plan generation, employs a Git-inspired branching mechanism for modular and hierarchical task execution with path isolation, and leverages state-aware task execution with semantic analysis to improve result understanding and feedback. We evaluate RCAFlow on three benchmark datasets provided by OpenRCA. Experimental results demonstrate that RCAFlow consistently outperforms existing methods across all datasets. Further ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each core module, highlighting the reliability, extensibility, and interpretability of RCAFlow to support complex RCA tasks within intelligent IT operations.
creator: Yufei Gao
creator: Zhengong Cai
creator: Bowei Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 300
ending page: 308
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36991

Energy-based Autoregressive Generation for Neural Population Dynamics
type: item
description: Understanding brain function represents a fundamental goal in neuroscience, with critical implications for therapeutic interventions and neural engineering applications. Computational modeling provides a quantitative framework for accelerating this understanding, but faces a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and high-fidelity modeling. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Energy-based Autoregressive Generation (EAG) framework that employs an energy-based transformer learning temporal dynamics in latent space through strictly proper scoring rules, enabling efficient generation with realistic population and single-neuron spiking statistics. Evaluation on synthetic Lorenz datasets and two Neural Latents Benchmark datasets (MC_Maze and Area2_bump) demonstrates that EAG achieves state-of-the-art generation quality with substantial computational efficiency improvements, particularly over diffusion-based methods. Beyond optimal performance, conditional generation applications show two capabilities: generalizing to unseen behavioral contexts and improving motor brain-computer interface decoding accuracy using synthetic neural data. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of energy-based modeling for neural population dynamics with applications in neuroscience research and neural engineering.
creator: Ningling Ge
creator: Sicheng Dai
creator: Yu Zhu
creator: Shan Yu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 309
ending page: 317
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36992

Failure Localization in Multi-Agent Code Generation via Knowledge-Guided and Transferable Reasoning
type: item
description: Recent advances in multi-agent Large Language Model-based code generation enable collaborative software development through role-specialized agents. However, failure localization of code generation remains challenging due to inter-agent dependencies and solution-path multiplicity. Consequently, existing prompting-based localization methods exhibit vulnerability towards semantically valid but non-canonical strategies. To address this, we propose FLKR (Failure Localization via Knowledge-guided Reasoning), an self-supervised framework that combines behavior encoding, knowledge-strategy alignment, and consistency scoring for solution-path invariant localization. To evaluate, we also introduce COFL (Code Oriented Failure Localization), the first expert-annotated benchmark for fine-grained failure localization. Experiments show FLKR outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based baselines by up to 14 points in Fault Localization Accuracy and 45 points in Top-1 accuracy, with strong performance in divergent, real-world, and refinement-critical cases. Such results demonstrate that our proposed FLKR generalizes well to real-world software development scenarios and opens up a new direction for failure-aware refinement recommendation by providing precise and interpretable responsibility signals.
creator: Mingyang Geng
creator: Shanzhi Gu
creator: Zhipeng Liu
creator: Chuanfu Xu
creator: Zhaoyang Qu
creator: Haotian Wang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 318
ending page: 326
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36993

GARNET: GoT-Based Alert Reduction and Narrative Event Tracing
type: item
description: Alerts generated by Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are often numerous and scattered, requiring significant effort from security analysts to manage, which severely slows response times. While recent alert correlation graph methods can effectively reduce alert volume, these graphs are often too complex for analysts to understand. As a result, analysts are increasingly seeking ways to automatically correlate alerts and generate concise, human-readable attack path summaries. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance due to their advanced capabilities in knowledge reserve and reasoning. In this work, we propose GARNET, a framework that uses LLMs for reasoning on alert correlation graphs. GARNET addresses three key technical challenges: 1) modality alignment between alert graphs and logs; 2) semantic alignment between alert graphs and logs; 3) enabling LLMs reasoning along graph paths. Specifically, we first project the embeddings of the graph and logs into the same vector space using contrastive learning. Then, we design self-supervised graph-log instructions to bridge the semantic gap between the graph and logs by training a novel LLM. Finally, GARNET uses a novel Graph-of-Thought (GoT)-based interaction reasoning approach to guide LLM reasoning along graph paths, ultimately generating structured, concise, and human-readable attack path summaries. Experimental results across six attack scenarios show that GARNET reduces false positives by an average of 80%, lowering the false positive rate to below 0.0037. It outperforms the latest approaches and provides more explainable attribution.
creator: Yiru Gong
creator: Song Liu
creator: Changzhi Zhao
creator: Junrong Liu
creator: Tian Tian
creator: Xiaobo Yang
creator: Bo Jiang
creator: Zhigang Lu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 327
ending page: 335
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36994

From Passive Perception to Active Memory: A Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization Framework Driven by Coarse-Grained Annotations
type: item
description: Image manipulation localization (IML) faces a fundamental trade-off between minimizing annotation cost and achieving fine-grained localization accuracy. Existing fully-supervised IML methods depend heavily on dense pixel-level mask annotations, which limits scalability to large datasets or real-world deployment. In contrast, the majority of existing weakly-supervised IML approaches are based on image-level labels, which greatly reduce annotation effort but typically lack precise spatial localization. To address this dilemma, we propose BoxPromptIML, a novel weakly-supervised IML framework that effectively balances annotation cost and localization performance. Specifically, we propose a coarse region annotation strategy, which can generate relatively accurate manipulation masks at lower cost. To improve model efficiency and facilitate deployment, we further design an efficient lightweight student model, which learns to perform fine-grained localization through knowledge distillation from a fixed teacher model based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Moreover, inspired by the human subconscious memory mechanism, our feature fusion module employs a dual-guidance strategy that actively contextualizes recalled prototypical patterns with real-time observational cues derived from the input. Instead of passive feature extraction, this strategy enables a dynamic process of knowledge recollection, where long-term memory is adapted to the specific context of the current image, significantly enhancing localization accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets show that BoxPromptIML outperforms or rivals fully-supervised models, while maintaining strong generalization, low annotation cost, and efficient deployment characteristics.
creator: Zhiqing Guo
creator: Dongdong Xi
creator: Songlin Li
creator: Gaobo Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 336
ending page: 344
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36995

CHASE: Contextual History for Adaptive and Simple Exploitation in Large Language Model Jailbreaking
type: item
description: We propose Contextual History for Adaptive and Simple Exploitation (CHASE), a novel multi-turn method for Large Language Model (LLM) jailbreaking. Rather than directly attack an LLM that may be difficult to jailbreak, CHASE first collects jailbroken histories from an easy-to-jailbreak LLM and then transfers them to the target LLM. Through this history transfer process, CHASE misleads the target LLM into thinking that it is responsible for producing the jailbroken histories and increases the chances of successful jailbreaking by prompting it to continue the conversation. Extensive evaluations on mainstream LLMs show that CHASE consistently achieves higher attack success rates and demands fewer computational resources compared to existing methods.
creator: Zhiqiang Hao
creator: Chuanyi Li
creator: Ye Fan
creator: Jun Cai
creator: Xiao Fu
creator: Shangqi Wang
creator: Hao Shen
creator: Jiao Yin
creator: Jidong Ge
creator: Bin Luo
creator: Vincent Ng
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 345
ending page: 353
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36996

S²Drug: Bridging Protein Sequence and 3D Structure in Contrastive Representation Learning for Virtual Screening
type: item
description: Virtual screening (VS) is an essential task in drug discovery, focusing on the identification of small-molecule ligands that bind to specific protein pockets. Existing deep learning methods, from early regression models to recent contrastive learning approaches, primarily rely on structural data while overlooking protein sequences, which are more accessible and can enhance generalizability. However, directly integrating protein sequences poses challenges due to the redundancy and noise in large-scale protein-ligand datasets. To address these limitations, we propose S²Drug, a two-stage framework that explicitly incorporates protein Sequence information and 3D Structure context in protein-ligand contrastive representation learning. In the first stage, we perform protein sequence pretraining on ChemBL using an ESM2-based backbone, combined with a tailored data sampling strategy to reduce redundancy and noise on both protein and ligand sides. In the second stage, we fine-tune on PDBBind by fusing sequence and structure information through a residue-level gating module, while introducing an auxiliary binding site prediction task. This auxiliary task guides the model to accurately localize binding residues within the protein sequence and capture their 3D spatial arrangement, thereby refining protein-ligand matching. Across multiple benchmarks, S²Drug consistently improves virtual screening performance and achieves strong results on binding site prediction, demonstrating the value of bridging sequence and structure in contrastive learning.
creator: Bowei He
creator: Bowen Gao
creator: Yankai Chen
creator: Yanyan Lan
creator: Chen Ma
creator: Philip S. Yu
creator: Ya-Qin Zhang
creator: Wei-Ying Ma
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 354
ending page: 362
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36997

FACTGUARD: Event-Centric and Commonsense-Guided Fake News Detection
type: item
description: Fake news detection methods based on writing style have achieved remarkable progress. However, as adversaries increasingly imitate the style of authentic news, the effectiveness of such approaches is gradually diminishing. Recent research has explored incorporating large language models (LLMs) to enhance fake news detection. Yet, despite their transformative potential, LLMs remain an untapped goldmine for fake news detection, with their real-world adoption hampered by shallow functionality exploration, ambiguous usability, and prohibitive inference costs. In this paper, we propose a novel fake news detection framework, dubbed FACTGUARD, that leverages LLMs to extract event-centric content, thereby reducing the impact of writing style on detection performance. Furthermore, our approach introduces a dynamic usability mechanism that identifies contradictions and ambiguous cases in factual reasoning, adaptively incorporating LLM advice to improve decision reliability. To ensure efficiency and practical deployment, we employ knowledge distillation to derive FACTGUARD-D, enabling the framework to operate effectively in cold-start and resource-constrained scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods in both robustness and accuracy, effectively addressing the challenges of style sensitivity and LLM usability in fake news detection.
creator: Jing He
creator: Han Zhang
creator: Yuanhui Xiao
creator: Wei Guo
creator: Shaowen Yao
creator: Renyang Liu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 363
ending page: 371
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36998

Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges
type: item
description: Recent studies have demonstrated that hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks. However, existing methods rely on the specific information mechanisms of target HGNNs, overlooking the common vulnerability caused by the significant differences in hyperedge pivotality along aggregation paths in most HGNNs, thereby limiting the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. In this paper, we present a novel framework, i.e., Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges (TH-Attack), to address these limitations. Specifically, we design a hyperedge recognizer via pivotality assessment to obtain pivotal hyperedges within the aggregation paths of HGNNs. Furthermore, we introduce a feature inverter based on pivotal hyperedges, which generates malicious nodes by maximizing the semantic divergence between the generated features and the pivotal hyperedges features. Lastly, by injecting these malicious nodes into the pivotal hyperedges, TH-Attack improves the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. Extensive experiments are conducted on six authentic datasets to validate the effectiveness of TH-Attack and the corresponding superiority to state-of-the-art methods.
creator: Meixia He
creator: Peican Zhu
creator: Le Cheng
creator: Yangming Guo
creator: Manman Yuan
creator: Keke Tang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 372
ending page: 380
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.36999

Directing Uncertainty-Aware Information Flow for Robust Diffusion Prediction
type: item
description: Information diffusion prediction is crucial for understanding social network dynamics, yet existing methods often neglect user participation uncertainty. This oversight typically stems from an implicit participation homogeneity assumption, which treats all observed interactions as equally reliable propagation signals, leading to fragile inferred topologies and uncertainty contamination. To address this, we propose SIEVE, a novel framework employing two synergistic strategies. First, robust node representations are learned via controllable uncertainty injection coupled with associated contrastive learning, mitigating topological fragility. Second, an uncertainty-aware directed graph aggregation mechanism is introduced, which dynamically constructs asymmetric aggregation topologies with adaptive weighting, thereby suppressing uncertainty contamination. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that SIEVE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering valuable insights for designing robust information diffusion prediction models.
creator: Weikang He
creator: Yunpeng Xiao
creator: Mengyang Huang
creator: Xuemei Mou
creator: Rong Wang
creator: Qian Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 381
ending page: 389
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37000

Learning Neural Operators from Partial Observations via Latent Autoregressive Modeling
type: item
description: Real-world scientific applications frequently encounter incomplete observational data due to sensor limitations, geographic constraints, or measurement costs. Although neural operators significantly advanced PDE solving in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy, their underlying assumption of fully-observed spatial inputs severely restricts applicability in real-world application. We introduce the first systematic framework for learning neural operators from partial observation. We identify and formalize two fundamental obstacles: (i) the supervision gap in unobserved regions that prevents effective learning of physical correlations, and (ii) the dynamic spatial mismatch between incomplete inputs and complete solution fields. Specifically, our proposed LANO (Latent Autoregressive Neural Operator) introduces two novel components designed explicitly to address the core difficulties of partial observations: (i) a mask-to-predict training strategy that creates artificial supervision by strategically masking observed regions, and (ii) a Physics-Aware Latent Propagator that reconstructs solutions through boundary-first autoregressive generation in latent space. Additionally, we develop POBench-PDE, a dedicated and comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for evaluating neural operators under partial observation conditions across three PDE-governed tasks. LANO achieves state-of-the-art performance with relative error reductions ranging from eighteen to sixty-nine percent across all benchmarks under patch-wise missingness with missing rates below fifty percent, including real-world climate prediction. Our approach effectively addresses practical scenarios with missing rates of up to seventy-five percent, to some extent bridging the existing gap between idealized research settings and the complexities of real-world scientific computing.
creator: Jingren Hou
creator: Hong Wang
creator: Pengyu Xu
creator: Chang Gao
creator: Huafeng Liu
creator: Liping Jing
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 390
ending page: 398
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37001

VoiceCloak: A Multi-Dimensional Defense Framework Against Unauthorized Diffusion-Based Voice Cloning
type: item
description: Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved remarkable success in realistic voice cloning (VC), while they also increase the risk of malicious misuse. Existing proactive defenses designed for traditional VC models aim to disrupt the forgery process, but they have been proven incompatible with DMs due to the intricate generative mechanisms of diffusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce VoiceCloak, a multi-dimensional proactive defense framework with the goal of obfuscating speaker identity and degrading perceptual quality in potential unauthorized VC. To achieve these goals, we conduct a focused analysis to identify specific vulnerabilities within DMs, allowing VoiceCloak to disrupt the cloning process by introducing adversarial perturbations into the reference audio. Specifically, to obfuscate speaker identity, VoiceCloak first targets speaker identity by distorting representation learning embeddings to maximize identity variation, which is guided by auditory perception principles. Additionally, VoiceCloak disrupts crucial conditional guidance processes, particularly attention context, thereby preventing the alignment of vocal characteristics that are essential for achieving convincing cloning. Then, to address the second objective, VoiceCloak introduces score magnitude amplification to actively steer the reverse trajectory away from the generation of high-quality speech. Noise-guided semantic corruption is further employed to disrupt structural speech semantics captured by DMs, degrading output quality. Extensive experiments highlight VoiceCloak's outstanding defense success rate against unauthorized diffusion-based voice cloning. Additional audio samples of VoiceCloak are available in demo pages.
creator: Qianyue Hu
creator: Junyan Wu
creator: Wei Lu
creator: Xiangyang Luo
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 399
ending page: 407
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37002

Transolver Is a Linear Transformer: Revisiting Physics-Attention Through the Lens of Linear Attention
type: item
description: Recent advances in Transformer-based Neural Operators have enabled significant progress in data-driven solvers for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Most current research has focused on reducing the quadratic complexity of attention to address the resulting low training and inference efficiency. Among these works, Transolver stands out as a representative method that introduces Physics-Attention to reduce computational costs. Physics-Attention projects grid points into slices for slice attention, then maps them back through deslicing. However, we observe that Physics-Attention can be reformulated as a special case of linear attention, and that the slice attention may even hurt the model performance. Based on these observations, we argue that its effectiveness primarily arises from the slice and deslice operations rather than interactions between slices. Building on this insight, we propose a two-step transformation to redesign Physics-Attention into a canonical linear attention, which we call Linear Attention Neural Operator (LinearNO). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on six standard PDE benchmarks, while reducing the number of parameters by an average of 40.0% and computational cost by 36.2%. Additionally, it delivers superior performance on two challenging, industrial-level datasets: AirfRANS and Shape-Net Car.
creator: Wenjie Hu
creator: Sidun Liu
creator: Peng Qiao
creator: Zhenglun Sun
creator: Yong Dou
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 408
ending page: 416
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37003

Revisiting the Canonicalization for Fast and Accurate Crystal Tensor Property Prediction
type: item
description: Predicting the tensor properties of crystalline materials is a fundamental task in materials science. Unlike single-value property prediction, which is inherently invariant, tensor property prediction requires maintaining O(3) group tensor equivariance. Such equivariance constraint often requires specialized architecture designs to achieve effective predictions, inevitably introducing tremendous computational costs. Canonicalization, a classical technique for geometry, has recently been explored for efficient learning with symmetry. In this work, we revisit the problem of crystal tensor property prediction through the lens of canonicalization. Specifically, we demonstrate how polar decomposition, a simple yet efficient algebraic method, can serve as a form of canonicalization and be leveraged to ensure equivariant tensor property prediction. Building upon this insight, we propose a general O(3)-equivariant framework for efficient crystal tensor property prediction, referred to as GoeCTP. By utilizing canonicalization, GoeCTP achieves high efficiency without requiring the explicit incorporation of equivariance constraints into the network architecture. Experimental results indicate that GoeCTP achieves the best prediction performance and runs at most 13 times faster compared to existing state-of-the-art methods in benchmarking datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.
creator: Haowei Hua
creator: Jingwen Yang
creator: Wanyu Lin
creator: Pan Zhou
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 417
ending page: 425
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37004

Towards Distance-Invariant Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Augmented Unsupervised Learning
type: item
description: Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) exploits inherent hardware-level imperfections of wireless transmitters as unclonable identifiers for device identification. These unique signatures, concealed in transmitted signals, inevitably experience complex distortions during wireless propagation (i.e., coupled with ambient noise and channel fading), making it extremely challenging for reliable extraction. Despite substantial research efforts dedicated to advancing effective fingerprint extraction techniques, current approaches still struggle in handling fingerprint robustness under distance variations, leading to severe SNR fluctuations and complex multipath effects. To address this gap, we propose the first unsupervised framework for distance-invariant radio frequency fingerprinting, eliminating dependence on labeled target domain data. Specifically, we first preprocess raw RF samples by confining them within a specified variation range and filtering noisy high-frequency components while avoiding aliasing. For source domain data, we then propose a set of physics-inspired data augmentation techniques designed to emulate realistic wireless signal propagation effects. Building on this, we introduce a dual alignment contrastive learning method to explicitly decouple identity-discriminative features, ensuring the model focuses on device-specific traits. Furthermore, we incorporate a pseudo-labeling-based domain adaptation module to refine the model for the unlabeled target domain, enhancing its generalization to unseen distances. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that our method achieves the identification accuracy outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by 40%, while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for edge deployment.
creator: Shiyue Huang
creator: Yuchen Su
creator: Hongbo Liu
creator: Zikang Ding
creator: Xuewan He
creator: Yanzhi Ren
creator: Haitao Jia
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 426
ending page: 434
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37005

TIDE: Temporal-Aware Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion Transformers in Image Generation
type: item
description: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are a powerful yet underexplored class of generative models compared to U-Net-based diffusion architectures. We propose TIDE—Temporal-aware sparse autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion transformErs—a framework designed to extract sparse, interpretable activation features across timesteps in DiTs. TIDE effectively captures temporally-varying representations and reveals that DiTs naturally learn hierarchical semantics (e.g., 3D structure, object class, and fine-grained concepts) during large-scale pretraining. Experiments show that TIDE enhances interpretability and controllability while maintaining reasonable generation quality, enabling applications such as safe image editing and style transfer.
creator: Victor Shea-Jay Huang
creator: Le Zhuo
creator: Yi Xin
creator: Zhaokai Wang
creator: Fu-Yun Wang
creator: Yuchi Wang
creator: Renrui Zhang
creator: Peng Gao
creator: Hongsheng Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 435
ending page: 443
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37006

Dynamic Geometric Equivariant Network for Full-Atom Antibody Design
type: item
description: Antibody design is critically important in biomedical and therapeutic contexts but remains extremely challenging due to the complexity of antibody sequence–structure relationships and stringent antigen specificity requirements. Traditional computational approaches rely on multi-stage pipelines and often overlook full-atom details (e.g., side-chain conformations) as well as fine-grained geometric features, resulting in limited effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, we propose Dynamic Geometric Equivariant Network (DGENet), an end-to-end full-atom antibody design model that integrates a geometric-kinematic equivariant dynamic optimization module (GK-EDO) with an full-atom E(3)-equivariant message-passing architecture. This framework enables iterative optimization of antibody structures under explicit geometric and kinematic constraints, generating complete antibody structures (including backbone and side chains) and simultaneously jointly optimizing the sequences and 3D structures of the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs). DGENet also introduces a novel virtual anchor docking mechanism that employs an adaptive PNet-Kabsch module to explicitly guide antibody–antigen binding and achieve precise bound conformations. Evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DGENet exhibits outstanding performance in antibody structure and sequence generation as well as in designing high-affinity antibodies, underscoring its reliability as an advanced antibody design model.
creator: Weihong Huang
creator: Feng Yang
creator: Qiang Zhang
creator: Juan Liu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 444
ending page: 452
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37007

PanFoMa: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Benchmark for Pan-Cancer
type: item
description: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is essential for decoding tumor heterogeneity. However, pan-cancer research still faces two key challenges: learning discriminative and efficient single-cell representations, and establishing a comprehensive evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we introduce \algoname, a lightweight hybrid neural network that combines the strengths of Transformers and state-space models to achieve a balance between performance and efficiency. \algoname consists of a front-end local-context encoder with shared self-attention layers to capture complex, order-independent gene interactions; and a back-end global sequential feature decoder that efficiently integrates global context using a linear-time state-space model. This modular design preserves the expressive power of Transformers while leveraging the scalability of Mamba to enable transcriptome modeling, effectively capturing both local and global regulatory signals. To enable robust evaluation, we also construct a large-scale pan-cancer single-cell benchmark, \algoname Bench, containing over 3.5 million high-quality cells across 33 cancer subtypes, curated through a rigorous preprocessing pipeline. Experimental results show that \algoname outperforms state-of-the-art models on our pan-cancer benchmark (+4.0\%) and across multiple public tasks, including cell type annotation (+7.4\%), batch integration (+4.0\%) and multi-omics integration (+3.1\%).
creator: Xiaoshui Huang
creator: Tianlin Zhu
creator: Yifan Zuo
creator: Xue Xia
creator: Zonghan Wu
creator: Jiebin Yan
creator: Dingli Hua
creator: Zongyi Xu
creator: Yuming Fang
creator: Jian Zhang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 453
ending page: 461
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37008

Controllable Financial Market Generation with Diffusion Guided Meta Agent
type: item
description: Generative modeling has transformed many fields, such as language and visual modeling, while its application in financial markets remains under-explored. As the minimal unit within a financial market is an order, order-flow modeling represents a fundamental generative financial task. However, current approaches often yield unsatisfactory fidelity in generating order flow, and their generation lacks controllability, thereby limiting their practical applications. In this paper, we formulate the challenge of controllable financial market generation, and propose a Diffusion Guided Meta Agent (DigMA) model to address it. Specifically, we employ a conditional diffusion model to capture the dynamics of the market state represented by time-evolving distribution parameters of the mid-price return rate and the order arrival rate, and we define a meta agent with financial economic priors to generate orders from the corresponding distributions. Extensive experimental results show that DigMA achieves superior controllability and generation fidelity. Moreover, we validate its effectiveness as a generative environment for downstream high-frequency trading tasks and its computational efficiency.
creator: Yu-Hao Huang
creator: Chang Xu
creator: Yang Liu
creator: Weiqing Liu
creator: Wu-Jun Li
creator: Jiang Bian
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 462
ending page: 470
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37009

Uncovering and Mitigating Destructive Multi-Embedding Attacks in Deepfake Proactive Forensics
type: item
description: With the rapid evolution of deepfake technologies and the wide dissemination of digital media, personal privacy is facing increasingly serious security threats. Deepfake proactive forensics, which involves embedding imperceptible watermarks to enable reliable source tracking, serves as a crucial defense against these threats. Although existing methods show strong forensic ability, they rely on an idealized assumption of single watermark embedding, which proves impractical in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formally define and demonstrate the existence of Multi-Embedding Attacks (MEA) for the first time. When a previously protected image undergoes additional rounds of watermark embedding, the original forensic watermark can be destroyed or removed, rendering the entire proactive forensic mechanism ineffective. To address this vulnerability, we propose a general training paradigm named Adversarial Interference Simulation (AIS). Rather than modifying the network architecture, AIS explicitly simulates MEA scenarios during fine-tuning and introduces a resilience-driven loss function to enforce the learning of sparse and stable watermark representations. Our method enables the model to maintain the ability to extract the original watermark correctly even after a second embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our plug-and-play AIS training paradigm significantly enhances the robustness of various existing methods against MEA.
creator: Lixin Jia
creator: Haiyang Sun
creator: Zhiqing Guo
creator: Yunfeng Diao
creator: Dan Ma
creator: Gaobo Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 471
ending page: 479
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37010

HyperLoad: A Cross-Modality Enhanced Large Language Model-Based Framework for Green Data Center Cooling Load Prediction
type: item
description: The explosive growth of artificial intelligence is exponentially escalating computational demand, inflating data center energy use and carbon emissions, and spurring rapid deployment of green data centers to relieve resource and environmental stress. Achieving sub-minute orchestration of renewables, storage, and loads, while minimizing PUE and lifecycle carbon intensity, hinges on accurate load forecasting. However, existing methods struggle to address small-sample scenarios caused by cold start, load distortion, multi-source data fragmentation, and distribution shifts in green data centers. We introduce HyperLoad, a cross-modality framework that exploits pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to overcome data scarcity. In the Cross-Modality Knowledge Alignment phase, textual priors and time-series attributes are mapped to a common latent space, maximizing the utility of prior knowledge. In the Multi-Scale Feature Modeling phase, domain-aligned priors are injected through adaptive prefix-tuning, enabling rapid scenario adaptation, while an Enhanced Global Interaction Attention mechanism captures cross-device temporal dependencies. The public GreenData dataset is released for benchmarking. Under both data-sufficient and data scarce regimes, HyperLoad consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, demonstrating its practicality for sustainable green data center management.
creator: Haoyu Jiang
creator: Boan Qu
creator: Junjie Zhu
creator: Fanjie Zeng
creator: Xiaojie Lin
creator: Wei Zhong
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 480
ending page: 488
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37011

RMSAGen: Integrating Multiple Sequence Alignment for Function RNA Design
type: item
description: Biological sequences, including RNAs and proteins, share similarities with natural languages, enabling the application of advanced language models to various biological tasks. However, due to its flexibility and lack of experimental data, RNA is a particularly challenging biological ``language'' compared to other biological sequences like proteins. RNA multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), which align evolutionarily related RNA sequences, can greatly enhance RNA biology modeling, as evidenced by their significant roles in structure prediction and function annotation. This raises the question of whether RNA MSAs can also benefit RNA design, which remains unexplored. This paper introduces RMSAGen, a model comprising RMSA-Encoder and RMSA-Decoder, that leverages MSAs to design functional RNA sequences. RMSA-Encoder effectively extracts MSA features, enhancing performance in functional prediction and solvent accessibility prediction tasks and supporting RMSA-Decoder in accurate RNA generation. RMSAGen can design RNA sequences that effectively bind to target RNA-binding proteins, and the design performance improves with an increasing number of sequences. In addition, the ribozymes designed with structural features by RMSAGen show strong computational metrics and exhibit biological activity during gel electrophoresis. These results highlight the effectiveness of RMSAGen, establishing it as a powerful tool and a new direction for RNA design.
creator: Jiyue Jiang
creator: Yanyu Chen
creator: Qingchuan Zhang
creator: Jiayi Li
creator: Xiangyu Shi
creator: Chang Zhou
creator: Ziqian Lin
creator: Jiuming Wang
creator: Dongchen He
creator: Liang Hong
creator: Qintong Li
creator: Pengan Chen
creator: Jiayang Chen
creator: Xinrui Zhang
creator: Jiao Yuan
creator: Tianqing Zhang
creator: Yu Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 489
ending page: 497
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37012

Magnitude-Modulated Equivariant Adapter for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Equivariant Graph Neural Networks
type: item
description: Pretrained equivariant graph neural networks based on spherical harmonics offer efficient and accurate alternatives to computationally expensive ab-initio methods, yet adapting them to new tasks and chemical environments still requires fine-tuning. Conventional parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as Adapters and LoRA, typically break symmetry, making them incompatible with those equivariant architectures. ELoRA, recently proposed, is the first equivariant PEFT method. It achieves improved parameter efficiency and performance on many benchmarks. However, the relatively high degrees of freedom it retains within each tensor order can still perturb pretrained feature distributions and ultimately degrade performance. To address this, we present Magnitude-Modulated Equivariant Adapter (MMEA), a novel equivariant fine-tuning method which employs lightweight scalar gating to modulate feature magnitudes on a per-order and per-multiplicity basis. We demonstrate that MMEA preserves strict equivariance and, across multiple benchmarks, consistently improves energy and force predictions to state-of-the-art levels while training fewer parameters than competing approaches. These results suggest that, in many practical scenarios, modulating channel magnitudes is sufficient to adapt equivariant models to new chemical environments without breaking symmetry, pointing toward a new paradigm for equivariant PEFT design.
creator: Dian Jin
creator: Yancheng Yuan
creator: Xiaoming Tao
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 498
ending page: 506
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37013

FinRpt: Dataset, Evaluation System and LLM-based Multi-agent Framework for Equity Research Report Generation
type: item
description: While LLMs have shown great success in financial tasks like stock prediction and question answering, their application in fully automating Equity Research Report generation remains uncharted territory. In this paper, we formulate the Equity Research Report (ERR) Generation task for the first time. To address the data scarcity and the evaluation metrics absence, we present an open-source evaluation benchmark for ERR generation - FinRpt. We frame a Dataset Construction Pipeline that integrates 7 financial data types and produces a high-quality ERR dataset automatically, which could be used for model training and evaluation. We also introduce a comprehensive evaluation system including 11 metrics to assess the generated ERRs. Moreover, we propose a multi-agent framework specifically tailored to address this task, named FinRpt-Gen, and train several LLM-based agents on the proposed datasets using Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning. Experimental results indicate the data quality and metrics effectiveness of the benchmark FinRpt and the strong performance of FinRpt-Gen, showcasing their potential to drive innovation in the ERR generation field. All code and datasets are publicly available.
creator: Song Jin
creator: Shuqi Li
creator: Shukun Zhang
creator: Rui Yan
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 507
ending page: 515
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37014

Stochastic Universal Adversarial Perturbations with Fixed Optimization Constraint and Ensured High-probability Transferability
type: item
description: Adversarial perturbations (APs) have become a great concern in image classification tasks. The most challenging branch, universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), are exploited to fool most of the unseen samples. Such one-to-all perturbations have the merit of transferability, which has strong practical significance. In this paper, we firstly define the transferability gap and the algorithm stability of the UAP algorithm, and prove the relationship between them. In analyzing the UAP algorithm stability, we prove that the convergence domain of existing UAP algorithms with dynamic constraints is excessively small, which degrades the capacity of UAPs. Thus, we further propose a new expected constraint and prove that UAPs in the expected constraint suit any sample in a high probability. Besides, we propose a Stochastic Universal Adversarial Perturbation (SUAP) that involves additive noise and the expected constraint. Finally, by treating the proposed algorithm as a stochastic differential equation, we prove an upper bound of the UAP algorithm stability of SUAP, which decreases exponentially at the beginning and then increases with a sublinear rate to at most a fixed constant. Experimental results show that SUAP is aligned with our analysis.
creator: Yulin Jin
creator: Xiaoyu Zhang
creator: Haoyu Tong
creator: Jian Lou
creator: Kai Wu
creator: Haibo Hu
creator: Xiaofeng Chen
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 516
ending page: 524
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37015

SVD-NO: Learning PDE Solution Operators with SVD Integral Kernels
type: item
description: Neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs) directly from data. Existing methods, such as those based on Fourier or graph techniques, make strong assumptions about the structure of the kernel integral operator, assumptions which may limit expressivity. We present SVD-NO, a neural operator that explicitly parameterizes the kernel by its singular-value decomposition (SVD) and then carries out the integral directly in the low-rank basis. Two lightweight networks learn the left and right singular functions, a diagonal parameter matrix learns the singular values, and a Gram-matrix regularizer enforces orthonormality. As SVD-NO approximates the full kernel, it obtains a high degree of expressivity. Furthermore, due to its low-rank structure the computational complexity of applying the operator remains reasonable, leading to a practical system. In extensive evaluations on five diverse benchmark equations, SVD-NO achieves a new state of the art. In particular, SVD-NO provides greater performance gains on PDEs whose solutions are highly spatially variable.
creator: Noam Koren
creator: Ralf J. J. Mackenbach
creator: Ruud J. G. van Sloun
creator: Kira Radinsky
creator: Daniel Freedman
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 525
ending page: 533
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37016

Targeted Pathway Inference for Biological Knowledge Bases via Graph Learning and Explanation
type: item
description: Retrieving targeted pathways in biological knowledge bases, particularly when incorporating wet-lab experimental data, remains a challenging task and often requires downstream analyses and specialized expertise. In this paper, we frame this challenge as a solvable graph learning and explaining task and propose a novel subgraph inference framework, ExPath, that explicitly integrates experimental data to classify various graphs (bio-networks) in biological databases. The links (representing pathways) that contribute more to classification can be considered as targeted pathways. Our framework can seamlessly integrate biological foundation models to encode the experimental molecular data. We propose ML-oriented biological evaluations and a new metric. The experiments involving 301 bio-networks evaluations demonstrate that pathways inferred by ExPath are biologically meaningful, achieving up to 4.5× higher Fidelity+ (necessity) and 14× lower Fidelity- (sufficiency) than explainer baselines, while preserving signaling chains up to 4× longer.
creator: Rikuto Kotoge
creator: Ziwei Yang
creator: Zheng Chen
creator: Yushun Dong
creator: Yasuko Matsubara
creator: Jimeng Sun
creator: Yasushi Sakurai
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 534
ending page: 542
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37017

RLSLM: A Hybrid Framework Combining Reinforcement Learning and a Rule-based Social Locomotion Model for Socially-aware Navigation
type: item
description: Navigating human-populated environments without causing discomfort is a critical capability for socially-aware agents. While rule-based approaches offer interpretability through predefined psychological principles, they often lack generalizability and flexibility. Conversely, data-driven methods can learn complex behaviors from large-scale datasets, but are typically inefficient, opaque, and difficult to align with human intuitions. To bridge this gap, we propose RLSLM, a hybrid Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates a rule-based Social Locomotion Model, grounded in empirical behavioral experiments, into the reward function of a reinforcement learning framework. The social locomotion model generates an orientation-sensitive social comfort field that quantifies human comfort across space, enabling socially aligned navigation policies with minimal training. RLSLM then jointly optimizes mechanical energy and social comfort, allowing agents to avoid intrusions into personal or group space. A human-agent interaction experiment using an immersive VR-based setup demonstrates that RLSLM outperforms state-of-the-art rule-based models in user experience. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further show the model’s significantly improved interpretability over conventional data-driven methods. This work presents a scalable, human-centered methodology that effectively integrates cognitive science and machine learning for real-world social navigation.
creator: Yitian Kou
creator: Yihe Gu
creator: Chen Zhou
creator: Dandan Zhu
creator: Shu-Guang Kuai
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 543
ending page: 551
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37018

OneFont: A Unified Agent for End-to-End Font Creation
type: item
description: Despite recent advancements in font generation, practitioners still grapple with a laborious trial-and-error workflow. To streamline this, we propose OneFont, an end-to-end framework that interprets user intents via free-form dialogue, seamlessly integrating both glyph synthesis and refinement modules. We introduce the Font with Thought (FwT) paradigm, reframing font design as a reasoning task where the model plans actions and articulates design rationales. OneFont’s core planner is trained via a two-stage regimen to master this paradigm. First, we instill reasoning abilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a new, comprehensive benchmark of 1,500 font families we built. Second, we refine the model's policy with a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a hybrid reward that assesses visual fidelity, rationale coherence, and transformation correctness. Extensive experiments show OneFont significantly surpasses existing methods in design quality and stroke precision across diverse scripts, validated on our new benchmark. We will release our dataset, code, and models.
creator: Yingxin Lai
creator: Yufei Liu
creator: Guoqing Yang
creator: Jiaxing Chai
creator: Zhiming Luo
creator: Shaozi Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 552
ending page: 560
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37019

RAG-Enhanced Collaborative LLM Agents for Drug Discovery
type: item
description: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to accelerate drug discovery. However, the specialized nature of biochemical data often necessitates costly domain-specific fine-tuning, posing critical challenges. First, it hinders the application of more flexible general-purpose LLMs in cutting-edge drug discovery tasks. More importantly, it limits the rapid integration of the vast amounts of scientific data continuously generated through experiments and research. Compounding these challenges is the fact that real-world scientific questions are typically complex and open-ended, requiring reasoning beyond pattern matching or static knowledge retrieval. To address these challenges, we propose CLADD, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-empowered agentic system tailored to drug discovery tasks. Through the collaboration of multiple LLM agents, CLADD dynamically retrieves information from biomedical knowledge bases, contextualizes query molecules, and integrates relevant evidence to generate responses - all without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. Crucially, we tackle key obstacles in applying RAG workflows to biochemical data, including data heterogeneity, ambiguity, and multi-source integration. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of this framework across a variety of drug discovery tasks, showing that it outperforms general-purpose and domain-specific LLMs as well as traditional deep learning approaches.
creator: Namkyeong Lee
creator: Edward De Brouwer
creator: Ehsan Hajiramezanali
creator: Tommaso Biancalani
creator: Chanyoung Park
creator: Gabriele Scalia
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 561
ending page: 569
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37020

BugSweeper: Function-Level Detection of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Using Graph Neural Networks
type: item
description: The rapid growth of Ethereum has made it more important to quickly and accurately detect smart contract vulnerabilities. While machine learning-based methods have shown some promise, many still rely on rule-based preprocessing designed by domain experts. Rule-based preprocessing methods often discard crucial context from the source code, potentially causing certain vulnerabilities to be overlooked and limiting adaptability to newly emerging threats. We introduce BugSweeper, an end-to-end deep learning framework that detects vulnerabilities directly from the source code without manual engineering. BugSweeper represents each Solidity function as a Function-Level Abstract Syntax Graph (FLAG), a novel graph that combines its Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with enriched control-flow and data-flow semantics. Then, our two-stage Graph Neural Network (GNN) analyzes these graphs. The first-stage GNN filters noise from the syntax graphs, while the second-stage GNN conducts high-level reasoning to detect diverse vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments on real-world contracts show that BugSweeper significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art detection methods. By removing the need for handcrafted rules, our approach offers a robust, automated, and scalable solution for securing smart contracts without any dependence on security experts.
creator: Uisang Lee
creator: Changhoon Chung
creator: Junmo Lee
creator: Soo-Mook Moon
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 570
ending page: 578
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37021

Do Large Language Models Think like the Brain? Sentence-Level Evidences from Layer-Wise Embeddings and fMRI
type: item
description: Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) and the human brain converge on similar computational principles remains a fundamental and important question in cognitive neuroscience and AI. Do the brain-like patterns observed in LLMs emerge simply from scaling, or do they reflect deeper alignment with the architecture of human language processing? This study focuses on the sentence-level neural mechanisms of language models, systematically investigating how layer-wise representations in LLMs align with the dynamic neural responses during human sentence comprehension. By comparing hierarchical embeddings from 14 publicly available LLMs with fMRI data collected from participants, who were exposed to a naturalistic narrative story, we constructed sentence-level neural prediction models to identify the model layers most significantly correlated with brain region activations. Results show that improvements in model performance drive the evolution of representational architectures toward brain-like hierarchies, particularly achieving stronger functional and anatomical correspondence at higher semantic abstraction levels. These findings advance our understanding of the computational parallels between LLMs and the human brain, highlighting the potential of LLMs as models for human language processing.
creator: Yu Lei
creator: Xingyang Ge
creator: Yi Zhang
creator: Yiming Yang
creator: Bolei Ma
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 579
ending page: 587
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37022

Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection
type: item
description: The proliferation of multimodal misinformation poses growing threats to public discourse and societal trust. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have enabled recent progress in multimodal misinformation detection (MMD), the rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools introduces a new challenge: GenAI-driven news diversity, characterized by highly varied and complex content. We show that this diversity induces multi-level drift, comprising (1) model-level misperception drift, where stylistic variations disrupt a model’s internal reasoning, and (2) evidence-level drift, where expression diversity degrades the quality or relevance of retrieved external evidence. These drifts significantly degrade the robustness of current LVLM-based MMD systems. To systematically study this problem, we introduce DriftBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 16,000 news instances across six categories of diversification. We design three evaluation tasks: (1) robustness of truth verification under multi-level drift; (2) susceptibility to adversarial evidence contamination generated by GenAI; and (3) analysis of reasoning consistency across diverse inputs. Experiments with six state-of-the-art LVLM-based detectors show substantial performance drops (average F1 ↓ 14.8%) and increasingly unstable reasoning traces, with even more severe failures under adversarial evidence injection. Our findings uncover fundamental vulnerabilities in existing MMD systems and suggest an urgent need for more resilient approaches in the GenAI era.
creator: Fanxiao Li
creator: Jiaying Wu
creator: Tingchao Fu
creator: Yunyun Dong
creator: Bingbing Song
creator: Wei Zhou
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 588
ending page: 596
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37023

anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understanding
type: item
description: The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked interest in their application to electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. However, existing ECG-focused MLLMs primarily focus on report generation tasks, often limited to single 12-lead, short-duration (10s) ECG inputs, thereby underutilizing the potential of MLLMs. To this end, we aim to develop a MLLM for ECG analysis that supports a broader range of tasks and more flexible ECG inputs. However, existing ECG-QA datasets are often monotonous. To address this gap, we first constructed the anyECG dataset, which encompasses a wide variety of tasks, including report generation, abnormal waveform localization, and open-ended question answering. In addition to standard hospital ECGs, we introduced long-duration reduced-lead ECGs for home environments and multiple ECG comparison scenarios commonly encountered in clinical practice. Furthermore, we propose the anyECG-chat model, which supports dynamic-length ECG inputs and multiple ECG inputs. We trained the model using a three-stage curriculum training recipe with the anyECG dataset. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted, demonstrating that anyECG-chat is capable of supporting various practical application scenarios, including not only common report generation tasks but also abnormal waveform localization for long-duration reduced-lead ECGs in home environments and comprehensive comparative analysis of multiple ECGs.
creator: Haitao Li
creator: Ziyu Li
creator: Yiheng Mao
creator: Ziyi Liu
creator: Zhoujian Sun
creator: Zhengxing Huang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 597
ending page: 605
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37024

MetaDiT: Enabling Fine-grained Constraints in High-degree-of Freedom Metasurface Design
type: item
description: Metasurfaces are ultrathin, engineered materials composed of nanostructures that manipulate light in ways unattainable by natural materials. Recent advances have leveraged computational optimization, machine learning, and deep learning to automate their design. However, existing approaches exhibit two fundamental limitations: (1) they often restrict the model to generating only a subset of design parameters, and (2) they rely on heavily downsampled spectral targets, which compromises both the novelty and accuracy of the resulting structures. The core challenge lies in developing a generative model capable of exploring a large, unconstrained design space while precisely capturing the intricate physical relationships between material parameters and their high-resolution spectral responses. In this paper, we introduce MetaDiT, a novel framework for high-fidelity metasurface design that addresses these limitations. Our approach leverages a robust spectrum encoder pretrained with contrastive learning, providing strong conditional guidance to a Diffusion Transformer-based backbone. Experiments demonstrate that MetaDiT outperforms existing baselines in spectral accuracy, we further validate our method through extensive ablation studies.
creator: Hao Li
creator: Andrey Bogdanov
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 606
ending page: 614
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37025

Scalable Vision-Guided Crop Yield Estimation
type: item
description: Precise estimation and uncertainty quantification for average crop yields are critical for agricultural monitoring and decision making. Existing data collection methods, such as crop cuts in randomly sampled fields at harvest time, are relatively time-consuming. Thus, we propose an approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI) to supplement these crop cuts with less time-consuming field photos. After training a computer vision model to predict the ground truth crop cut yields from the photos, we learn a "control function" that recalibrates these predictions with the spatial coordinates of each field. This enables fields with photos but not crop cuts to be leveraged to improve the precision of zone-wide average yield estimates. Our control function is learned by training on a dataset of nearly 20,000 real crop cuts and photos of rice and maize fields in sub-Saharan Africa. To improve precision, we pool training observations across different zones within the same first-level subdivision of each country. Our final PPI-based point estimates of the average yield are provably asymptotically unbiased and cannot increase the asymptotic variance beyond that of the natural baseline estimator --- the sample average of the crop cuts --- as the number of fields grows. We also propose a novel bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap to construct accompanying confidence intervals. Even in zones with as few as 20 fields, the point estimates show significant empirical improvement over the baseline, increasing the effective sample size by as much as 73% for rice and by 12-23% for maize. The confidence intervals are accordingly shorter at minimal cost to empirical finite-sample coverage. This demonstrates the potential for relatively low-cost images to make area-based crop insurance more affordable and thus spur investment into sustainable agricultural practices.
creator: Harrison H Li
creator: Medhanie Irgau
creator: Nabil Janmohamed
creator: Karen Solveig Rieckmann
creator: David B. Lobell
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 615
ending page: 622
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37026

Learning Cell-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Modal Representations for Robust Molecular Modeling
type: item
description: Understanding how chemical perturbations propagate through biological systems is essential for robust molecular property prediction. While most existing methods focus on chemical structures alone, recent advances highlight the crucial role of cellular responses such as morphology and gene expression in shaping drug effects. However, current cell-aware approaches face two key limitations: (1) modality incompleteness in external biological data, and (2) insufficient modeling of hierarchical dependencies across molecular, cellular, and genomic levels. We propose CHMR (Cell-aware Hierarchical Multi-Modal Representations), a robust framework that jointly models local-global dependencies between molecules and cellular responses and captures latent biological hierarchies via a novel tree-structured vector quantization module. Evaluated on public benchmarks spanning 696 tasks, CHMR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding average improvements of 3.6% on classification and 17.2% on regression tasks. These results demonstrate the advantage of hierarchy-aware, multi-modal learning for reliable and biologically grounded molecular representations, offering a generalizable framework for integrative biomedical modeling.
creator: Mengran Li
creator: Zelin Zang
creator: Wenbin Xing
creator: Junzhou Chen
creator: Ronghui Zhang
creator: Jiebo Luo
creator: Stan Z. Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 623
ending page: 631
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37027

Detecting Fake News in Short Videos Through Multi-View Aggregation
type: item
description: The increasing prominence of short video platforms has positioned them as a primary channel for public awareness of current events, while also facilitating the widespread dissemination of fake news, thus highlighting the critical need for automated detection technologies. In contrast to fake news confined to text and images, short video news encompasses multiple modalities and extensive information, presenting heightened challenges. Most existing research emphasizes the analysis of news content or user comments alone, while overlooking the crucial role of publishers, leading to poor model performance when handling fake news lacking obvious false signals. Therefore, we propose a Publisher Profiling Module to identify new false signals. To enable a more comprehensive detection of misinformation, we design a Multi-View Aggregation (MVA) model, simultaneously evaluating news from three distinct perspectives: sentiment analysis, content understanding, and publisher profiling. Late fusion is applied at the decision level to leverage the complementary strengths of these perspectives, addressing the limitations of single-view methods. Our experiments conducted on the FakeSV and FVC datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
creator: Nuo Li
creator: Yuan Xiong
creator: Chengliang Liu
creator: Jie Wen
creator: Chao Huang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 632
ending page: 640
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37028

WeightFlow: Learning Stochastic Dynamics via Evolving Weight of Neural Network
type: item
description: Modeling stochastic dynamics from discrete observations is a key interdisciplinary challenge. Existing methods often fail to estimate the continuous evolution of probability densities from trajectories or face the curse of dimensionality. To address these limitations, we presents a novel paradigm: modeling dynamics directly in the weight space of a neural network by projecting the evolving probability distribution. We first theoretically establish the connection between dynamic optimal transport in measure space and an equivalent energy functional in weight space. Subsequently, we design WeightFlow, which constructs the neural network weights into a graph and learns its evolution via a graph controlled differential equation. Experiments on interdisciplinary datasets show that WeightFlow improves performance by an average of 43.02\% over state-of-the-art methods, providing an effective and scalable solution for modeling high-dimensional stochastic dynamics.
creator: Ruikun Li
creator: Jiazhen Liu
creator: Huandong Wang
creator: Qingmin Liao
creator: Yong Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 641
ending page: 649
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37029

Intention Chain-of-Thought Prompting with Dynamic Routing for Code Generation
type: item
description: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong generative capabilities and have shown great potential in code generation. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods enhance model reasoning by eliciting intermediate steps, but suffer from two major limitations: First, their uniform application tends to induce overthinking on simple tasks. Second, they lack intention abstraction in code generation, such as explicitly modeling core algorithmic design and efficiency, leading models to focus on surface-level structures while neglecting the global problem objective. Inspired by the cognitive economy principle of engaging structured reasoning only when necessary to conserve cognitive resources, we propose RoutingGen, a novel difficulty-aware routing framework that dynamically adapts prompting strategies for code generation. For simple tasks, it adopts few-shot prompting; for more complex ones, it invokes a structured reasoning strategy, termed Intention Chain-of-Thought (ICoT), which we introduce to guide the model in capturing task intention, such as the core algorithmic logic and its time complexity. Experiments across three models and six standard code generation benchmarks show that RoutingGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in most settings, while reducing total token usage by 46.37% on average across settings. Furthermore, ICoT outperforms six existing prompting baselines on challenging benchmarks.
creator: Shen Li
creator: Li Huang
creator: Shaoxiong Zhan
creator: Weifeng Sun
creator: Tao Yin
creator: Zhongxin Liu
creator: Meng Yan
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 650
ending page: 658
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37030

PLA-MGRA: Multi-Granularity and Relation-Aware Learning for Efficient and Generalizable Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction
type: item
description: Protein-Ligand Affinity (PLA) prediction quantifies the interaction strength to guide rational drug design. Existing approaches typically analyze interaction at a single granularity and overlook tightly coupled relationships between protein and ligand in both structure and functionality, consequently yielding suboptimal representations, leading to significant performance drops in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose PLA-MGRA, a minimalist and effective PLA prediction framework. Specifically, PLA-MGRA captures both fine-grained atomic details and coarse grained functional semantics within the 3D structure of protein–ligand complexes, through multi-granularity learning. To further parse the coupled protein–ligand relationships, we design relation-aware learning to enhance the binding nature of representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple protein–ligand affinity prediction benchmarks, while also offering generalizability and interpretability.
creator: Shunfan Li
creator: Jiangkai Long
creator: Xin Zou
creator: Chang Tang
creator: Yuanyuan Liu
creator: Xiao He
creator: Xuesong Yan
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 659
ending page: 667
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37031

MergeDNA: Context-Aware Genome Modeling with Dynamic Tokenization Through Token Merging
type: item
description: Modeling genomic sequences faces two unsolved challenges: the information density varies widely across different regions, while there is no clearly defined minimum vocabulary unit. Relying on either four primitive bases or independently designed DNA tokenizers, existing approaches with naive masked language modeling pre-training often fail to adapt to the varying complexities of genomic sequences. Leveraging Token Merging techniques, this paper introduces a hierarchical architecture that jointly optimizes a dynamic genomic tokenizer and latent Transformers with context-aware pre-training tasks. As for network structures, the tokenization module automatically chunks adjacent bases into words by stacking multiple layers of the differentiable token merging blocks with local-window constraints, then a Latent Encoder captures the global context of these merged words by full-attention blocks. Symmetrically employing a Latent Decoder and a Local Decoder, MergeDNA learns with two pre-training tasks: Merged Token Reconstruction simultaneously trains the dynamic tokenization module and adaptively filters important tokens, while Adaptive Masked Token Modeling learns to predict these filtered tokens to capture informative contents. Extensive experiments show that MergeDNA achieves superior performance on three popular DNA benchmarks and several multi-omics tasks with fine-tuning or zero-shot evaluation, outperforming typical tokenization methods and large-scale DNA foundation models.
creator: Siyuan Li
creator: Kai Yu
creator: Anna Wang
creator: Zicheng Liu
creator: Chang Yu
creator: Jingbo Zhou
creator: Qirong Yang
creator: Yucheng Guo
creator: Xiaoming Zhang
creator: Stan Z. Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 668
ending page: 676
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37032

Beyond Fully Supervised Pixel Annotations: Scribble-Driven Weakly-Supervised Framework for Image Manipulation Localization
type: item
description: Deep learning-based image manipulation localization (IML) methods have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but typically rely on large-scale pixel-level annotated datasets. To address the challenge of acquiring high-quality annotations, some recent weakly supervised methods utilize image-level labels to segment manipulated regions. However, the performance is still limited due to insufficient supervision signals. In this study, we explore a form of weak supervision that improves the annotation efficiency and detection performance, namely scribble annotation supervision. We re-annotated mainstream IML datasets with scribble labels and propose the first scribble-based IML (Sc-IML) dataset. Additionally, we propose the first scribble-based weakly supervised IML framework. Specifically, we employ self-supervised training with a structural consistency loss to encourage the model to produce consistent predictions under multi-scale and augmented inputs. In addition, we propose a prior-aware feature modulation module (PFMM) that adaptively integrates prior information from both manipulated and authentic regions for dynamic feature adjustment, further enhancing feature discriminability and prediction consistency in complex scenes. We also propose a gated adaptive fusion module (GAFM) that utilizes gating mechanisms to regulate information flow during feature fusion, guiding the model toward emphasizing potential tampered regions. Finally, we propose a confidence-aware entropy minimization loss. This loss dynamically regularizes predictions in weakly annotated or unlabeled regions based on model uncertainty, effectively suppressing unreliable predictions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing fully supervised approaches in terms of average performance both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.
creator: Songlin Li
creator: Guofeng Yu
creator: Zhiqing Guo
creator: Yunfeng Diao
creator: Dan Ma
creator: Gaobo Yang
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 677
ending page: 685
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37033

RFF-TTA: Physical Information-Aware Prototype for Temporally Varying RF Fingerprinting Online Test-Time-Adaptation
type: item
description: In recent years, RF fingerprinting (RFF) has emerged as a promising technology for wireless device authentication. However, temporal variations in device load and temperature, along with channel effects, lead to inconsistencies in RFF distributions between training and testing phases. As a result, deep learning (DL)-based recognition models often suffer from degraded performance. To address this problem, we propose the first test-time-adaptation (TTA) approach to improve the domain generalization ability of RFF recognition models. We first analyze the causes of time-varying RFF distribution shifts, such as carrier frequency offset (CFO), and develop a physical impairment-based data augmentation strategy. Based on this, we further propose a physically information-aware prototype to guide the model for TTA. Our method requires no model retraining or labeled test samples, and is a lightweight, nonparametric solution. Finally, our approach is extensively evaluated using mobile phones with the IEEE 802.11 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, which demonstrates that our scheme can effectively improve RFF average recognition performance by about 7.8%.
creator: Taotao Li
creator: Yiyang Li
creator: Zhenyu Wen
creator: Jiahao Lin
creator: Jinhao Wan
creator: Jie Su
creator: Cong Wang
creator: Zhen Hong
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 686
ending page: 694
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37034

Adaptive Fidelity Estimation for Quantum Programs with Graph-Guided Noise Awareness
type: item
description: Fidelity estimation is a critical yet resource-intensive step in testing quantum programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the required number of measurements is difficult to predefine due to hardware noise, device heterogeneity, and transpilation-induced circuit transformations. We present QuFid, an adaptive and noise-aware framework that determines measurement budgets online by leveraging circuit structure and runtime statistical feedback. QuFid models a quantum program as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employs a control-flow-aware random walk to characterize noise propagation along gate dependencies. Backend-specific effects are captured via transpilation-induced structural deformation metrics, which are integrated into the random-walk formulation to induce a noise-propagation operator. Circuit complexity is then quantified through the spectral characteristics of this operator, providing a principled and lightweight basis for adaptive measurement planning. Experiments on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Quantum backends show that QuFid significantly reduces measurement cost compared to fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining acceptable fidelity bias.
creator: Tingting Li
creator: Ziming Zhao
creator: Jianwei Yin
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 695
ending page: 703
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37035

Guided Distillation and Risk Adaptive Evolution for Multi-Robot Navigation
type: item
description: Recent advancements in multi-robot navigation have explored methods that combine Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like scene understanding or high-level decision-making. However, these approaches face challenges with high inference latency and potential hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, GUIDER, that utilizes an LLM in two different offline roles. First, we leverage the LLM as an offline knowledge source. Its expertise is distilled into a compact model, which is applied only when the RL agent is uncertain about its own value estimates and the model itself is confident in its prediction. Additionally, we utilize the LLM as an offline semantic engine. This process translates the LLM's high-level understanding of situational risk into a dynamic adjustment of the RL agent's behavioral style, evolving a function that optimally balances conservative and aggressive actions. We conduct extensive experiments in both terrestrial and maritime settings. Across all maritime scenarios (3–12 robots), GUIDER improves the task success rate and reduces the collision rate significantly compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based multi-robot navigation methods.
creator: Xuyang Li
creator: Jianwu Fang
creator: Lin Li
creator: Boyuan Chen
creator: Guangliang Li
creator: Jianru Xue
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 704
ending page: 711
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37036

DS-ProGen: A Dual-Structure Deep Language Model for Functional Protein Design
type: item
description: Inverse Protein Folding (IPF) is a critical subtask in the field of protein design, aiming to engineer amino acid sequences capable of folding correctly into a specified three-dimensional (3D) conformation. Although substantial progress has been achieved in recent years, existing methods generally rely on either backbone coordinates or molecular surface features alone, which restricts their ability to fully capture the complex chemical and geometric constraints necessary for precise sequence prediction. To address this limitation, we present DS-ProGen, a dual-structure deep language model for functional protein design, which integrates both backbone geometry and surface-level representations. By incorporating backbone coordinates as well as surface chemical and geometric descriptors into a next-amino-acid prediction paradigm, DS-ProGen is able to generate functionally relevant and structurally stable sequences while satisfying both global and local conformational constraints. On the PRIDE dataset, DS-ProGen attains the current state-of-the-art recovery rate of 61.47%, demonstrating the synergistic advantage of multi-modal structural encoding in protein design. Furthermore, DS-ProGen excels in predicting interactions with a variety of biological partners, including ligands, ions, and RNA, confirming its robust functional retention capabilities.
creator: Yanting Li
creator: Zikang Wang
creator: Jiyue Jiang
creator: Ziqian Lin
creator: Dongchen He
creator: Yuheng Shan
creator: Yanruisheng Shao
creator: Jiayi Li
creator: Xiangyu Shi
creator: Jiuming Wang
creator: Yanyu Chen
creator: Yimin Fan
creator: Han Li
creator: Yu Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 712
ending page: 720
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37037

Uncovering Pretraining Code in LLMs: A Syntax-Aware Attribution Approach
type: item
description: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted and licensed content in their training data have grown, especially in the context of code. Open-source code, often protected by open source licenses (e.g, GPL), poses legal and ethical challenges when used in pretraining. Detecting whether specific code samples were included in LLM training data is thus critical for transparency, accountability, and copyright compliance. We propose SynPrune, a syntax-pruned membership inference attack method tailored for code. Unlike prior MIA approaches that treat code as plain text, SynPrune leverages the structured and rule-governed nature of programming languages. Specifically, it identifies and excludes consequent tokens that are syntactically required and not reflective of authorship, from attribution when computing membership scores. Experimental results show that SynPrune consistently outperforms the state-of-the-arts. Our method is also robust across varying function lengths and syntax categories.
creator: Yuanheng Li
creator: Zhuoyang Chen
creator: Xiaoyun Liu
creator: Yuhao Wang
creator: Mingwei Liu
creator: Yang Shi
creator: Kaifeng Huang
creator: Shengjie Zhao
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 721
ending page: 729
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37038

Factorization-in-Loop:Proximal Fill-in Minimization for Sparse Matrix Reordering
type: item
description: Fill-ins are new nonzero elements in the summation of the upper and lower triangular factors generated during LU factorization. For large sparse matrices, they will increase the memory usage and computational time, and be reduced through proper row or column arrangement, namely matrix reordering. Finding a row or column permutation with the minimal fill-ins is NP-hard, and surrogate objectives are designed to derive fill-in reduction permutations or learn a reordering function. However, there is no theoretical guarantee between the golden criterion and these surrogate objectives. Here we propose to learn a reordering network by minimizing l1 norm of triangular factors of the reordered matrix to approximate the exact number of fill-ins. The reordering network utilizes a graph encoder to predict row or column node scores. For inference, it is easy and fast to derive the permutation from sorting algorithms for matrices. For gradient based optimization, there is a large gap between the predicted node scores and resultant triangular factors in the optimization objective. To bridge the gap, we first design two reparameterization techniques to obtain the permutation matrix from node scores. The matrix is reordered by multiplying the permutation matrix. Then we introduce the factorization process into the objective function to arrive at target triangular factors. The overall objective function is optimized with the alternating direction method of multipliers and proximal gradient descent. Experimental results on benchmark sparse matrix collection SuiteSparse show the fill-in and LU factorization time reduction of our proposed method is 0.2% and 17.8% compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
creator: Ziwei Li
creator: Shuzi Niu
creator: Tao Yuan
creator: Huiyuan Li
creator: Wenjia Wu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 730
ending page: 737
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37039

Benchmarking LLMs for Political Science: A United Nations Perspective
type: item
description: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process—drafting, voting, and discussing—and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate LLMs in UN decision-making, contributing to the growing intersection of AI and political science.
creator: Yueqing Liang
creator: Liangwei Yang
creator: Chen Wang
creator: Congying Xia
creator: Rui Meng
creator: Xiongxiao Xu
creator: Haoran Wang
creator: Ali Payani
creator: Kai Shu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 738
ending page: 745
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37040

CellStream: Dynamical Optimal Transport Informed Embeddings for Reconstructing Cellular Trajectories from Snapshots Data
type: item
description: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), especially temporally resolved datasets, enables genome-wide profiling of gene expression dynamics at single-cell resolution across discrete time points. However, current technologies provide only sparse, static snapshots of cell states and are inherently influenced by technical noise, complicating the inference and representation of continuous transcriptional dynamics. Although embedding methods can reduce dimensionality and mitigate technical noise, the majority of existing approaches typically treat trajectory inference separately from embedding construction, often neglecting temporal structure. To address this challenge, here we introduce CellStream, a novel deep learning framework that jointly learns embedding and cellular dynamics from single-cell snapshots data by integrating an autoencoder with unbalanced dynamical optimal transport. Compared to existing methods, CellStream generates dynamics-informed embeddings that robustly capture temporal developmental processes while maintaining high consistency with the underlying data manifold. We demonstrate CellStream’s effectiveness on both simulated datasets and real scRNA-seq data, including spatial transcriptomics. Our experiments indicate significant quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art methods in representing cellular trajectories with enhanced temporal coherence and reduced noise sensitivity. Overall, CellStream provides a new tool for learning and representing continuous streams from the noisy, static snapshots of single-cell gene expression.
creator: Yue Ling
creator: Peiqi Zhang
creator: Zhenyi Zhang
creator: Peijie Zhou
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 746
ending page: 754
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37041

Multimodal Table Understanding with Difficulty-aware Reinforcement Learning
type: item
description: Multimodal table understanding, which aims for a comprehensive grasp of table content by integrating cellular text, tabular structure, and visual presentation, remains a core yet challenging area of research. We identify that the structural complexity of a table, quantifiable by intrinsic properties such as the ratio of merged cells and the total number of cells, presents a significant obstacle for existing models. Our empirical analysis reveals that the performance of leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deteriorates markedly as table complexity increases, exposing a critical vulnerability in their ability to perceive and reason over intricate tabular data. To address this challenge, we propose MM-Table-R1, a model enhanced through difficulty-aware reinforcement learning (RL) post-training strategy. Specifically, we introduce both task-level and data-level curriculum learning. The task-level curriculum is designed to establish a capability ladder, where the model first learns basic perceptual and semantic alignment of table data, and then progresses to acquiring multi-step reasoning capabilities. The data-level curriculum ensures that the model is not exposed to difficult samples prematurely, facilitating a more gradual and effective learning process. Furthermore, we invest considerable effort in constructing a high-quality, large-scale training corpus by curating and processing data from diverse open-source table datasets, ensuring that each instance is paired with an objectively verifiable reward signal. Demonstrating exceptional parameter efficiency, our 3B-parameter model sets a new benchmark by surpassing both established 3B and 7B models, including those specifically designed for table reasoning.
creator: Chaohu Liu
creator: Haoyu Cao
creator: YongXiang Hua
creator: Linli Xu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 755
ending page: 763
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37042

NOTAM-Evolve: A Knowledge-Guided Self-Evolving Optimization Framework with LLMs for NOTAM Interpretation
type: item
description: Accurate interpretation of Notices To Airmen (NOTAMs) is critical for aviation safety, yet their condensed and cryptic language poses significant challenges to both manual and automated processing. Existing automated systems are typically limited to "Shallow Parsing," failing to extract the actionable intelligence needed for operational decisions. We formalize the complete interpretation task as "Deep Parsing," a dual-reasoning challenge requiring both dynamic knowledge grounding (linking the NOTAM to evolving real-world aeronautical data) and schema-based inference (applying static domain rules to deduce operational status). To tackle this challenge, we propose NOTAM-Evolve, a self-evolving framework that enables a Large Language Model (LLM) to autonomously master complex NOTAM interpretation. Leveraging a knowledge graph-enhanced retrieval module for data grounding, the framework introduces a crucial closed-loop learning process where the LLM progressively improves from its own outputs, minimizing the need for extensive human-annotated reasoning traces. In conjunction with this framework, we introduce a new benchmark dataset of 10,000 expert-annotated NOTAMs. Our experiments demonstrate that NOTAM-Evolve achieves a 30.4% absolute accuracy improvement over the base LLM, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the task of structured NOTAM interpretation.
creator: Maoqi Liu
creator: Quan Fang
creator: Yuhao Wu
creator: Can Zhao
creator: Yang Yang
creator: Kaiquan Cai
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 764
ending page: 772
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37043

ProtSAE: Disentangling and Interpreting Protein Language Models via Semantically-Guided Sparse Autoencoders
type: item
description: 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.
creator: Xiangyu Liu
creator: Haodi Lei
creator: Yi Liu
creator: Yang Liu
creator: Wei Hu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 773
ending page: 781
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37044

Predict and Resist: Long-Term Accident Anticipation Under Sensor Noise
type: item
description: Accident anticipation is essential for proactive and safe autonomous driving, where even a brief advance warning can enable critical evasive actions. However, two key challenges hinder real-world deployment: (1) noisy or degraded sensory inputs from weather, motion blur, or hardware limitations, and (2) the need to issue timely yet reliable predictions that balance early alerts with false-alarm suppression. We propose a unified framework that integrates diffusion-based denoising with a time-aware actor-critic model to address these challenges. The diffusion module reconstructs noise-resilient image and object features through iterative refinement, preserving critical motion and interaction cues under sensor degradation. In parallel, the actor-critic architecture leverages long-horizon temporal reasoning and time-weighted rewards to determine the optimal moment to raise an alert, aligning early detection with reliability. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (DAD, CCD, A3D) demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and significant gains in mean time-to-accident, while maintaining robust performance under Gaussian and impulse noise. Qualitative analyses further show that our model produces earlier, more stable, and human-aligned predictions in both routine and highly complex traffic scenarios, highlighting its potential for real-world, safety-critical deployment.
creator: Xingcheng Liu
creator: Bin Rao
creator: Yanchen Guan
creator: Chengyue Wang
creator: Haicheng Liao
creator: Jiaxun Zhang
creator: Chengyu Lin
creator: Meixin Zhu
creator: Zhenning Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 782
ending page: 790
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37045

CLM-Access: A Specialized Foundation Model for High-Dimensional Single-Cell ATAC-Seq Analysis
type: item
description: Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, cell language models (CLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm to learn cell representations from high-dimensional single-cell data—particularly transcriptomic profiles from scRNA-seq. These foundation models have shown remarkable potential across a variety of downstream applications. However, there remains a lack of foundation models for scATAC-seq data, which measures chromatin accessibility at single-cell level and is critical for decoding epigenetic regulation. Developing such model is considerably more challenging due to the unique characteristics of scATAC-seq data, including the vast number of chromatin regions, lack of standardized annotations, extreme sparsity, and near-binary distributions. To address these challenges, we systematically explore various strategies and propose CLM-Access, a specialized foundation model for scATAC-seq data. CLM-Access incorporates three main innovations: (1) an unified data processing pipeline that maps 2.8 million cells onto an unified reference of over 1 million chromatin regions; (2) a specialized patching and embedding strategy to effectively manage high-dimensional inputs; and (3) a tailored masking and loss function design that preserves fine-grained regional information while enhancing training efficiency and representation quality. With comprehensive benchmarks, we show that CLM-Access significantly outperforms existing methods in key downstream tasks, including batch effect correction, cell type annotation, RNA expression prediction, and multi-modal integration. This work establishes a scalable and interpretable foundation model for single-cell epigenomic analysis and expands the application of CLMs in single-cell research.
creator: Ziqiang Liu
creator: Bowen Li
creator: Zhenyu Xu
creator: Yantao Li
creator: Junwei Zhang
creator: Chulin Sha
creator: Xiaolin Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 791
ending page: 799
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37046

When Genes Speak: A Semantic-Guided Framework for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data Clustering
type: item
description: Spatial transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling with spatial context, offering unprecedented insights into the tissue microenvironment. However, most computational models treat genes as isolated numerical features, ignoring the rich biological semantics encoded in their symbols. This prevents a truly deep understanding of critical biological characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we present SemST, a semantic-guided deep learning framework for spatial transcriptomics data clustering. SemST leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable genes to "speak" through their symbolic meanings, transforming gene sets within each tissue spot into biologically informed embeddings. These embeddings are then fused with the spatial neighborhood relationships captured by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), achieving a coherent integration of biological function and spatial structure. We further introduce the Fine-grained Semantic Modulation (FSM) module to optimally exploit these biological priors. The FSM module learns spot-specific affine transformations that empower the semantic embeddings to perform an element-wise calibration of the spatial features, thus dynamically injecting high-order biological knowledge into the spatial context. Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets show that SemST achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. Crucially, the FSM module exhibits plug-and-play versatility, consistently improving the performance when integrated into other baseline methods.
creator: Jiangkai Long
creator: Yanran Zhu
creator: Chang Tang
creator: Kun Sun
creator: Yuanyuan Liu
creator: Xuesong Yan
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 800
ending page: 808
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37047

LLMs Unleashed: Generating Protocol Code from RFC Specifications
type: item
description: RFC (Request for Comments) documents constitute the foundation of network protocol standardization. However, they are expressed in natural language, they tend to be lengthy and ambiguous, forcing protocol implementers to rely on extensive manual parsing and coding—a process that is both labor-intensive and prone to errors. This makes the automated parsing and comprehension of RFC documents a major challenge in network protocol research. To address this gap, we introduce large language models (LLMs) into the task of automatic network protocol code generation from RFC documents (RFC2Code) and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework to quantitatively assess LLM performance. We develop an end-to-end automated protocol generation system, APG (Automated Protocol-Generation), which supports implementations of ICMP, IGMP, NTP, and TCP. Compared to prior NLP (Natural language processing) methods, APG achieves a fully automated workflow with approximately 3.17× faster processing, 95% compile success and behavioral correctness for stateless protocols like ICMP, and 90% interoperability for complex stateful protocols such as TCP, requiring only minimal manual intervention.
creator: Junfeng Long
creator: Jinshu Su
creator: Biao Han
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 809
ending page: 817
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37048

From Blind Transfer to Wise Selection: Prototype-Driven Neighbor-Domain Adaptation for Fake News Detection
type: item
description: Multimodal fake news detection across different domains is hampered by the critical challenge of negative transfer, which arises from the indiscriminate fusion of knowledge from all available source domains. Existing methods attempt to learn domain-invariant features or leverage external knowledge but often aggregate information from all domains equally. However, these approaches largely ignore the asymmetric relationships between domains, leading to performance degradation when irrelevant or conflicting knowledge is introduced. To address this, we propose a novel PANDA (Prototype-driven Asymmetric Neighbor-Domain Adaptation) framework that dynamically selects and integrates knowledge from only the most beneficial domains. Initially, PANDA employs a Domain-aware Modal Prompt Generation (DMPG) module to learn transferable knowledge representations for each domain. We then introduce a novel Prototype-based Asymmetric Distance (PAD) to quantify directional domain transferability, which guides a Gumbel-based Neighbor Selector (GNS) to identify the most relevant neighbor domains. Subsequently, a Domain-Collaborative Attention (DCA) module adaptively fuses the selected knowledge to enhance the target domain's representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate PANDA's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines with an F1-score improvement of 1.5% on the Weibo-21 dataset.
creator: Wayne Lu
creator: Yiheng Li
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 818
ending page: 826
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37049

PHPFND: Detecting Fake News via Post-Hoc Processing of LLMs Hallucination
type: item
description: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform excellently in fake news detection tasks, but their outputs are often accompanied by hallucinations, i.e., generated content that is contradictory to facts. Previous studies have mostly mitigated hallucinations through prompt design. However, this paper reveals that regions in news articles which easily induce hallucinations in LLMs correspond closely to the most challenging regions for fake news detectors. In this paper, we propose a fake news detection framework (PHPFND) based on post-hoc processing of LLMs hallucination. Specifically, our framework includes a hallucination detection module (ISHD) based on information structuring that detects three types of hallucinations in LLMs in a targeted manner, and a hallucination-driven feature enhancement mechanism (HDFE) that incorporates hallucination signals as explicit features into sentence-level encoding and feature fusion to guide the model’s attention toward high-risk regions. Experimental results on two mainstream fake news datasets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms LLM-based baselines.
creator: Jinke Ma
creator: Jiachen Ma
creator: Wei Zhang
creator: Yong Liu
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 827
ending page: 835
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37050

DynamicRTL: RTL Representation Learning for Dynamic Circuit Behavior
type: item
description: There is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn representations of circuits, focusing primarily on their static characteristics. However, these models fail to capture circuit runtime behavior, which is crucial for tasks like circuit verification and optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce DR-GNN (DynamicRTL-GNN), a novel approach that learns RTL circuit representations by incorporating both static structures and multi-cycle execution behaviors. DR-GNN leverages an operator-level Control Data Flow Graph (CDFG) to represent Register Transfer Level (RTL) circuits, enabling the model to capture dynamic dependencies and runtime execution. To train and evaluate DR-GNN, we build the first comprehensive dynamic circuit dataset, comprising over 6,300 Verilog designs and 63,000 simulation traces. Our results demonstrate that DR-GNN outperforms existing models in branch hit prediction and toggle rate prediction. Furthermore, its learned representations transfer effectively to related dynamic circuit tasks, achieving strong performance in power estimation and assertion prediction.
creator: Ruiyang Ma
creator: Yunhao Zhou
creator: Yipeng Wang
creator: Yi Liu
creator: Zhengyuan Shi
creator: Ziyang Zheng
creator: Kexin Chen
creator: Zhiqiang He
creator: Lingwei Yan
creator: Gang Chen
creator: Qiang Xu
creator: Guojie Luo
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
date: 2026-03-14
publication date: 2026-03-14
volume: 40
number: 1
starting page: 836
ending page: 843
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v40i1.37051