AAAI 2026 Papers

Neurosymbolic (NeSy) AI combines neural architectures and symbolic reasoning to improve accuracy, interpretability, and generalization. While logic inference on top of subsymbolic modules has been shown to effectively guarantee these properties, this often comes at the cost of reduced scalability, which can severely limit the usability of NeSy models. This paper introduces DeepProofLog (DPrL), a novel NeSy system based on stochastic logic programs, which addresses the scalability limitations of previous methods. DPrL parameterizes all derivation steps with neural networks, allowing efficient neural guidance over the proving system. Additionally, we establish a formal mapping between the resolution process of our deep stochastic logic programs and Markov Decision Processes, enabling the application of dynamic programming and reinforcement learning techniques for efficient inference and learning. This theoretical connection improves scalability for complex proof spaces and large knowledge bases. Our experiments on standard NeSy benchmarks and knowledge graph reasoning tasks demonstrate that DPrL outperforms existing state-of-the-art NeSy systems, advancing scalability to larger and more complex settings than previously possible.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image and video generation. However, their inherently multiple step inference process imposes substantial computational overhead, hindering real-world deployment. Accelerating diffusion models is therefore essential, yet determining how to combine multiple model acceleration techniques remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, we introduce a framework driven by large language models (LLMs) for automated acceleration code generation and evaluation. First, we present DiffBench, a comprehensive benchmark that implements a three stage automated evaluation pipeline across diverse diffusion architectures, optimization combinations and deployment scenarios. Second, we propose DiffAgent, an agent that generates optimal acceleration strategies and codes for arbitrary diffusion models. DiffAgent employs a closed-loop workflow in which a planning component and a debugging component iteratively refine the output of a code generation component, while a genetic algorithm extracts performance feedback from the execution environment to guide subsequent code refinements. We provide a detailed explanation of the DiffBench construction and the design principles underlying DiffAgent. Extensive experiments show that DiffBench offers a thorough evaluation of generated codes and that DiffAgent significantly outperforms existing LLMs in producing effective diffusion acceleration strategies.

Large transformer models, trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated impressive few-shot performance on previously unseen tasks without requiring parameter updates. This capability has also been explored in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents interact with the environment to retrieve context and maximize cumulative rewards, showcasing strong adaptability in complex settings. However, in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents must coordinate toward a shared goal, decentralized policy deployment can lead to mismatches in task alignment and reward assignment, limiting the efficiency of policy adaptation. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval (MAICC), a novel approach designed to enhance coordination by fast adaptation. Our method involves training a centralized embedding model to capture fine-grained trajectory representations, followed by decentralized models that approximate the centralized one to obtain team-level task information. Based on the learned embeddings, relevant trajectories are retrieved as context, which, combined with the agents' current sub-trajectories, inform decision-making. During decentralized execution, we introduce a novel memory mechanism that effectively balances test-time online data with offline memory. Based on the constructed memory, we propose a hybrid utility score that incorporates both individual- and team-level returns, ensuring credit assignment across agents. Extensive experiments on cooperative MARL benchmarks, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF) and SMAC (v1/v2), show that MAICC enables faster adaptation to unseen tasks compared to existing methods.

Post-Training Quantization enables efficient Vision Transformer (ViTs) deployment with a small calibration data, and its prevalent use of uniform quantization harnesses AI accelerator matrix cores for high-speed inference. However, the application of uniform quantization is fundamentally challenged by the extreme non-uniformity of activation distributions.Specifically, the power-law nature of post-Softmax attention scores and the significant inter-channel variance in post-GELU activations create a dilemma for conventional quantization, as it struggles to preserve critical high-magnitude values without sacrificing overall precision. To resolve this core conflict, we introduce UQ-ViT (Uniform Quantization for Vision Transformers), a novel uniform quantization framework designed to reconcile high precision with hardware efficiency. Central to UQ-ViT are two operators: Dynamic Elimination of Maximum (DeMax) and Normalization Quantization (NormQuant). DeMax is a quantization operator for post-Softmax attention scores that utilizes uniform quantization. It dynamically eliminates and preserves dominant values, effectively mitigating quantization loss from the extreme values in the power-law distribution. NormQuant utilizes a per-channel quantization strategy during quantization and reverts to a per-tensor format for dequantization, achieving both high accuracy and computational efficiency. Crucially, it is applicable to any linear layer, enabling effective quantization of post-GELU activations in ViTs. Through extensive experiments on various ViTs and vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy while ensuring hardware friendliness.

Feature dynamics have emerged as a critical topic about open-environment learning due to the instability of feature availability. While traditional feature evolution targets single-label tasks, multi-label learning is essential to accommodate the exploding annotation spaces. However, multi-label classification with incremental and decremental features is a crucial yet underexplored problem, which poses the challenge of preserving feature representations and label correlations from historical instances and simultaneously adapting to newly arriving streaming data. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage, one-pass learning approach termed MLID. It attempts to compress the informative content of vanished features into the domain of survived ones, facilitate the propagation of label dependencies via low-rank regularization of the classifier, and incorporate augmented features to construct an adaptive classification mechanism. Besides, we design optimization strategies for each stage and provide theoretical guarantees of convergence. Moreover, we establish the generalization error bound of MLID and demonstrate that the compactness of the trace norm and the reuse of models based on effective features can enhance the generalization performance. Finally, we extend it to multi-shot case and extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our MLID.

Few-shot graph learning remains a fundamental yet challenging problem, especially under heterophilic graph settings where connected nodes are likely to belong to different classes. In such scenarios, two key challenges arise: (1) unreliable or noisy graph structures that hinder effective message passing, and (2) semantic inconsistency: in heterophilic graphs, aggregating messages from neighbors of different classes entangles representations and introduces misleading semantics. These issues are further exacerbated by the limited labeled data inherent to few-shot learning, making it difficult to adaptively repair structure or disentangle semantics. To address these challenges, we propose DAPrompt, a Dual Alignment Prompt framework that jointly calibrates graph structure and semantic representations across the learning pipeline. In the pretraining stage, DAPrompt incorporates a graph structure learning module to denoise and repair the underlying topology, enhancing structural reliability. In the prompt tuning stage, we introduce two coordinated modules: a structure-aware prompt learner, which employs prompt tokens to repair unreliable graph structures and capture structure-level alignment, and a semantics-aligned prompt learner, which enhances the graph using target node semantics to mitigate representation noise caused by class-mismatched propagation. Extensive experiments on both node-level and graph-level few-shot benchmarks validate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the value of structure-semantic dual alignment in heterophilic few-shot graph learning.

The performance of Offline reinforcement learning is significantly impacted by the issue of state distributional shift, and out-of-distribution (OOD) state correction is a popular approach to address this problem. However, previous methods correct the agent's transition distributions in a supervised way, which significantly degrades the flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Density-Aware Safety Perception (DASP) for OOD state correction. Specifically, our method encourages the agent to prioritize actions that lead to outcomes with higher data density, thereby promoting its operation within or the return to in-distribution (safe) regions. To achieve this, we optimize the objective within a variational framework that concurrently considers both the potential outcomes of decision-making and their density, thus providing crucial contextual information for safe decision-making. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method through extensive experimental evaluations on the offline MuJoCo and AntMaze suites.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a novel paradigm that describe the samples by label distribution of a sample. However, acquiring LDL dataset is costly and time-consuming, which leads to the birth of incomplete label distribution learning (IncomLDL). All the previous IncomLDL methods set the description degrees of "missing" labels in an instance to 0, but remains those of other labels unchanged. This setting is unrealistic because when certain labels are missing, the degrees of the remaining labels will increase accordingly. We fix this unrealistic setting in IncomLDL and raise a new problem: LDL with hidden labels (HidLDL), which aims to recover a complete label distribution from a real-world incomplete label distribution where certain labels in an instance are omitted during annotation. To solve this challenging problem, we discover the significance of proportional information of the observed labels and capture it by an innovative constraint to utilize it during the optimization process. We simultaneously use local feature similarity and the global low-rank structure to reveal the mysterious veil of hidden labels. Moreover, we **theoretically** give the recovery bound of our method, proving the feasibility of our method in learning from hidden labels. Extensive recovery and predictive experiments on various datasets prove the superiority of our method to state-of-the-art LDL and IncomLDL methods.

This paper introduces the Functionality-Driven Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization (FD-MAGRPO) algorithm, which is designed to enhance exploration efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL) for analog integrated circuit sizing. Our proposed method integrates two key innovations: (1) a critic-free multi-agent optimization framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that eliminates the critic network and achieves stable and efficient policy updates; and (2) a functionality-driven grouping strategy, that enables agents to coordinate exploration by functional roles instead of circuit blocks, thereby improving credit assignment and cooperation. Experimental results on practical low-dropout regulator (LDO) circuits with 65–179 design parameters show that the proposed method achieves rapid convergence with only 800–3000 simulations, yielding a 4.8×–13.0× speedup over state-of-the-art methods. Mathematical analysis and empirical studies validate that the combination of critic-free optimization and functionality-based grouping leads to higher exploration efficiency and faster convergence. The proposed method enables the discovery of higher circuit performances that are inaccessible to conventional approaches, establishing FD-MAGRPO as a robust and efficient solution for complex analog-LDO sizing tasks.

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is a proliferating paradigm for LMM training. Analogous to high-level reasoning tasks, RFT is similarly applicable to low-level vision domains, including image quality assessment (IQA). Existing RFT-based IQA methods typically use rule-based output rewards to verify the model's rollouts but provide no reward supervision for the "think” process, leaving its correctness and efficacy uncontrolled. Furthermore, these methods typically fine-tune directly on downstream IQA tasks without explicitly enhancing the model’s native low-level visual quality perception, which may constrain its performance upper bound. In response to these gaps, we propose the multi‐stage RFT IQA framework (Refine-IQA). In Stage-1, we build the Refine-Perception-20K dataset (with 12 main distortions, 20,907 locally-distorted images, and over 55K RFT samples) and design multi-task reward functions to strengthen the model’s visual quality perception. In Stage-2, targeting the quality scoring task, we introduce a probability difference reward involved strategy for "think" process supervision. The resulting Refine-IQA Series Models achieve outstanding performance on both perception and scoring tasks—and, notably, our paradigm activates a robust "think” (quality interpretating) capability that also attains exceptional results on the corresponding quality interpreting benchmark.

The data scaling law has significantly enhanced large multi-modal models (LMMs) performance across various downstream tasks. However, in the domain of perceptual video quality assessment (VQA), the potential of data scaling remains unprecedented due to the scarcity of labeled resources and the insufficient scale of datasets. To address this, we propose OmniVQA, a framework designed to efficiently build high-quality, machine-dominated synthetic multi-modal instruction databases (MIDBs) for VQA. We then scale up to create OmniVQA-Chat-400K, the largest dataset in the VQA field concurrently. Our focus is on the technical and aesthetic quality dimensions, with abundant in-context instruction data to provide fine-grained VQA knowledge. Additionally, we build the OmniVQA-MOS-20K dataset to enhance the model's quantitative quality rating capabilities. We then introduce a complementary training strategy that effectively leverages the knowledge from datasets for different tasks. Furthermore, we propose the OmniVQA-FG (fine-grain)-Benchmark to evaluate the fine-grained performance of models. Our results demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tasks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model’s internal parametric knowledge, leading to unreliable outputs. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect such realistic conflict scenarios. Most focus solely on intra-memory conflicts, while context-memory and inter-context conflicts remain largely unaddressed. Furthermore, commonly used factual knowledge-based evaluations are often overlooked, and existing datasets lack a thorough investigation into conflict detection capabilities.To bridge this gap, we propose MMKC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate factual knowledge conflicts in both context-memory and inter-context scenarios. MMKC-Bench encompasses four types of multimodal knowledge conflicts and includes 1,881 knowledge instances and 3,997 images across 32 broad types, collected through automated pipelines with human verification. We evaluate four representative series of LMMs on both model behavior analysis and conflict detection tasks. Our findings show that while current LMMs are capable of recognizing knowledge conflicts, they tend to favor internal parametric knowledge over external evidence. We hope MMKC-Bench will foster further research in multimodal knowledge conflict and enhance the development of multimodal RAG systems.

Conformal prediction (CP) is a general framework to quantify the predictive uncertainty of machine learning models that uses a set prediction to include the true label with a valid probability. To align the uncertainty measured by CP, conformal training methods minimize the size of the prediction sets. A typical way is to use a surrogate indicator function, usually Sigmoid or Gaussian error function. However, these surrogate functions do not have a uniform error bound to the indicator function, leading to uncontrollable learning bounds. In this paper, we propose a simple cost-sensitive conformal training algorithm that does not rely on the indicator approximation mechanism. Specifically, we theoretically show that minimizing the expected size of prediction sets is upper bounded by the expected rank of true labels. To this end, we develop an importance weighting strategy that assigns the weight using the rank of true label on each data. Our analysis provably demonstrates the tightness between the proposed weighted objective and the expected size of conformal prediction sets. Extensive experiments verify the validity of our theoretical insights, and superior empirical performance over other conformal training in terms of predictive efficiency with 21.38% reduction for average prediction set size.

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) aims to capture the dependencies among multiple variables and their temporal dynamics to predict future values. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have set a new paradigm for MTSF, incorporating external knowledge into the modeling process through textual prompts. However, we observe that current LLM-based methods fail to exploit these priors due to their coarse-grained representation of time series data, which hinders effective alignment of the two modals. To address this, we propose M3Time, a multi-modal, multi-scale, and multi-frequency framework for multivariate time series forecasting. It enhances the quality of time series representations and facilitates the integration of LLM semantic priors with fine-grained temporal features. Additionally, M3Time further improved training stability and model robustness with an adaptive mixed loss function, which dynamically balances L1 and L2 error terms. Experiment results on seven real-world public datasets show that M3Time consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its effectiveness.

We revisit the problem of generating synthetic data under differential privacy. To address the core limitations of marginal-based methods, we propose the Private Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network with Bayes Network Structure (PrAda-GAN), which integrates the strengths of both GAN-based and marginal-based approaches. Our method adopts a sequential generator architecture to capture complex dependencies among variables, while adaptively regularizing the learned structure to promote sparsity in the underlying Bayes network. Theoretically, we establish diminishing bounds on the parameter distance, variable selection error, and Wasserstein distance. Our analysis shows that leveraging dependency sparsity leads to significant improvements in convergence rates. Empirically, experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PrAda-GAN outperforms existing tabular data synthesis methods in terms of the privacy–utility trade-off.

Graph prompt learning (GPL) serves as a crucial framework for mitigating the knowledge transfer by reconciling the substantial mismatch between pre-training models and downstream tasks. However, prevalent GPL paradigm fail to accommodate graph data affected by privacy-induced noise. Specifically, 1) GPL typically relies on the stability of original graph structures for the design of effective prompt templates; 2) the construction of prompts lacks explicit guidance to suppress noise introduced by privacy perturbations; 3) prompt optimization on single disturbed graphs can easily lead to overfitting to noise patterns. To address these issues, we propose a novel privacy-aware graph prompt learning (PAGPL) scheme, which alleviates spurious clues caused by privacy noise injection. Initially, an adaptive structure-wise Bayesian estimation is applied to reconstruct the privacy-perturbed graphs. Subsequently, to suppress the impact of residual perturbation, a noise-resilient prompt generation is employed to filter unreliable structural and signals. Ultimately, we incorporate a multi-view-based progressive privacy consistency to promote the robustness of prompts against the semantic misalignment while improving the task-specific consistency. The experimental results reveal that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) GPL approaches with a 10%–60% improvement in accuracy under various real-world privacy-perturbed scenarios.

While Transformers have revolutionized time series forecasting, they remain trapped by manual architecture design—every model uses the same attention mechanism, normalization, and activation choices. What if we could automatically discover the perfect architectural recipe for each dataset? This work introduces STrans (Spontaneous Transformer), a comprehensive neural architecture search framework for time series Transformers that simultaneously explores attention variants, normalization techniques, activation functions, and encoding operations. Using differentiable architecture search, STrans automatically discovers architectures that outperform manually designed baselines. However, the experiments reveal a surprising and counterintuitive finding: complex searched architectures often fail catastrophically, while simpler configurations generalize better. This "search overfitting" phenomenon challenges fundamental assumptions about automated architecture design in time series domains. The work not only advances automated model design but uncovers critical insights that will reshape how we think about neural architecture search for temporal data.

Clustering is a fundamental tool that has garnered significant interest across a wide range of applications including text analysis. To improve clustering accuracy, many researchers have proposed incorporating background knowledge, typically in the form of must‑link and cannot‑link constraints, to guide the clustering process. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in improving clustering quality through LLM-based automatic constraint generation. In this paper, we propose a novel constraint‑generation approach that reduces resource consumption by generating constraint sets rather than using traditional pairwise constraints. This improves both query efficiency and constraint accuracy compared to state‑of‑the‑art methods. We further introduce a constrained clustering algorithm tailored to the characteristics of LLM-generated constraints. Our method incorporates a confidence threshold and a penalty mechanism to address potentially inaccurate constraints. We evaluate our approach on five text datasets, considering both the cost of constraint generation and overall clustering performance. The results show that our method achieves clustering accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms while reducing the number of LLM queries by more than 20 times.

Video-to-music (V2M) generation aims to create music that aligns with visual content. However, two main challenges persist in existing methods: (1) the lack of explicit rhythm modeling hinders audiovisual temporal alignments; (2) effectively integrating various visual features to condition music generation remains non-trivial. To address these issues, we propose Diff-V2M, a general V2M framework based on a hierarchical conditional diffusion model, comprising two core components: visual feature extraction and conditional music generation. For rhythm modeling, we begin by evaluating several rhythmic representations, including low-resolution mel-spectrograms, tempograms, and onset detection functions (ODF), and devise a rhythmic predictor to infer them directly from videos. To ensure contextual and affective coherence, we also extract semantic and emotional features. All features are incorporated into the generator via a hierarchical cross-attention mechanism, where emotional features shape the affective tone via the first layer, while semantic and rhythmic features are fused in the second cross-attention layer. To enhance feature integration, we introduce timestep-aware fusion strategies, including feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and weighted fusion, allowing the model to adaptively balance semantic and rhythmic cues throughout the diffusion process. Extensive experiments identify low-resolution ODF as a more effective signal for modeling musical rhythm and demonstrate that Diff-V2M outperforms existing models on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of objective metrics and subjective comparisons.