Singapore

Experimental design is critical for evidence-based decision-making in healthcare, marketing, and public policy. However, designing efficient experiments across heterogeneous subgroups presents significant challenges. Existing methods often optimize for statistical power or overall sample efficiency, overlooking crucial fairness considerations across these different subgroups. To address this gap, we introduce a Fairness-Aware Contextual Track-and-Stop Design (F-CTSD) algorithm. The proposed F-CTSD algorithm provides statistical guarantees on subgroup fairness while minimizing required sample sizes. We quantify the fairness-efficiency trade-off and derive the sample complexity bound for the proposed F-CTSD algorithm under its fairness constraints. We further theoretically prove that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm consistently produces accurate treatment effect estimates even under fairness requirements, enhancing statistical reliability. Numerical experiments show that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm outperforms existing methods, achieving higher sample efficiency while reducing subgroup fairness violations by 4.95\%.

AAAI 2026

Fairness-Aware Design for Contextual Experiments: Guaranteeing Reliability and Equity in Heterogeneous Subgroups

and fairness.

adaptive experimental design

best arm identification

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Real-world knowledge graphs (KGs) contain not only standard triple-based facts, but also more complex, heterogeneous types of facts, such as hyper-relational facts with auxiliary key-value pairs, temporal facts with additional timestamps, and nested facts that imply relationships between facts. These richer forms of representation have attracted significant attention due to their enhanced expressiveness and capacity to model complex semantics in real-world scenarios. However, most existing studies suffer from two main limitations: (1) they typically focus on modeling only specific types of facts, thus making it difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios with multiple fact types; and (2) they struggle to achieve generalizable hierarchical (inter-fact and intra-fact) modeling due to the complexity of these representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose UniHR, a Unified Hierarchical Representation learning framework, which consists of a learning-optimized Hierarchical Data Representation (HiDR) module and a unified Hierarchical Structure Learning (HiSL) module. The HiDR module unifies hyper-relational KGs, temporal KGs, and nested factual KGs into triple-based representations. Then HiSL incorporates intra-fact and inter-fact message passing, focusing on enhancing both semantic information within individual facts and enriching the structural information between facts. To go beyond the unified method itself, we further explore the potential of unified representation in complex real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets across 5 types of KGs demonstrate the effectiveness of UniHR and highlight the strong potential of unified representations. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/UniHR.

UniHR: Hierarchical Representation Learning for Unified Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting class-level semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.

Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment for Domain Adaptive Retrieval

Multi-person pose estimation in real-world scenarios remains a challenging task due to frequent occlusions, scale variations, and complex human interactions. Existing methods often rely on fixed keypoint association patterns that fail to capture the dynamic and context-dependent nature of human body topologies, leading to misalignment and false detections. In this work, we propose a topology-aware dynamic association framework that adaptively models inter-keypoint relationships conditioned on local context and pose topology. The proposed framework comprises three stages: a human-to-keypoint detection module for coarse localization, a dynamic keypoint association module that learns flexible connectivity patterns between joints, and a fine-grained refinement module for precise pose adjustment. By integrating topological priors into dynamic learning and multi-stage optimization, our proposed method effectively mitigates the issues caused by occlusions and overlapping instances. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes.

Learning Topology-Aware Dynamic Associations for Robust Multi-Person Pose Estimation

The Multi-agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem involves finding collision-free paths for a team of agents in a known, static environment, with important applications in warehouse automation, logistics, or last-mile delivery. To meet the needs of these large-scale applications, current learning-based methods often deploy the same fully trained, decentralized network to all agents to improve scalability. However, such parameter sharing typically results in homogeneous behaviors among agents, which may prevent agents from breaking ties around symmetric conflict (e.g., bottlenecks) and might lead to live-/deadlocks. In this paper, we propose SYLPH, a novel learning-based MAPF framework aimed to mitigate the adverse effects of homogeneity by allowing agents to learn and dynamically select different social behaviors (akin to individual, dynamic roles), without affecting the scalability offered by parameter sharing. Specifically, SYLPH offers a novel hierarchical mechanism by introducing Social Value Orientation (SVO) as a temporally extended latent variable that plays a central role in both policy generation and reward assignment. To support this hierarchical decision-making process, we introduce Social-aware Multi-Policy PPO (SMP3O), a reinforcement learning method that ensures stable and effective training through a mechanism for the cross-utilization of advantages. Moreover, we design an SVO-based learning tie-breaking algorithm, allowing agents to proactively avoid collisions, rather than relying solely on post-processing techniques. As a result of this hierarchical decision-making and exchange of social preferences, SYLPH endows agents with the ability to reason about the MAPF task through more latent spaces and nuanced contexts, leading to varied responses that can help break ties around symmetric conflicts. Our comparative experiments show that SYLPH achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing other learning-based MAPF planners in random, room-like, and maze-like maps, while our ablation studies demonstrate the advantages of each component in SYLPH. We finally experimentally validate our trained policies on hardware in three types of maps, showing how SYLPH allows agents to find high-quality paths under real-life conditions. Our code and videos are available at: marmotlab.github.io/mapf_sylph.

Social Behavior as a Key to Learning-based Multi-Agent Pathfinding Dilemmas

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has been widely recognized as a powerful self-supervised paradigm for learning general-purpose visual representations. However, standard MIM based on random masking tends to underperform in domain-specific tasks like Scene Text Recognition (STR), due to challenges such as information sparsity and appearance discrepancies caused by partial occlusion or distortion. To address this issue, we propose a novel pre-training framework called Appearance Discrepancy-guided Sequence Hybrid Masking (DSHM), specifically designed to learn robust representations for STR. To this end, we introduce an Appearance Discrepancy Metric that quantifies the discrepancy level of each image patch by measuring its deviation from anisotropic local discrepancy and intra-instance global style discrepancy. The resulting discrepancy scores are utilized in two key components: (1) A Sequence Hybrid Masking strategy, which prioritizes masking high-discrepancy patches in coherent block forms, thereby elevating the pretext task from simple pixel-level completion to more complex structural reasoning; (2) Discrepancy-Conditioned Tokens (DC-Tokens), which encode prior knowledge about patch difficulty into the decoder, enabling an adaptive reconstruction process and improving the model robustness under scenarios with partial occlusion or text distortion. We achieve competitive performance on multiple benchmark datasets, including common benchmarks, Union14M benchmarks, and Chinese benchmarks.

Appearance Discrepancy-guided Sequence Hybrid Masking for Robust Scene Text Recognition

Model-heterogeneous federated tuning (MHFT) enables the privacy-preserving fine-tuning of foundation models in heterogeneous systems by allowing clients and the server to adopt different model architectures. Depth partial training—where each client updates only a subset of the model's layers—alleviates system heterogeneity but exacerbates client drift, which stems from clients optimizing different objectives and therefore degrades overall performance. Beyond the well-known statistical bias—where non-IID data leads to client drift—we identify a \textbf{structural bias} arising from clients deploying only partial layers of the global model, which serves as an important cause of drift. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the possible range of structural bias expands linearly with the number of missing layers. To counter this effect, we introduce \texttt{FedBRICK} (Federated Bias Recovery via Inserted Calibrative Kernels), which inserts tiny \texttt{BRICK}s into each client’s subnetwork. We employ a dual-end layer-wise distillation scheme to train these blocks using both client-side local data and a small public proxy set on the server. This design effectively mitigates the structural bias caused by layer dropping, reduces client drift, and remains practical for storage-constrained devices. Extensive experiments on federated learning benchmarks confirm that \texttt{FedBRICK} delivers up to a $5\%$ average accuracy gain while requiring no more than $1.44\%$ extra storage per client.

FedBRICK: Structural Bias Aware Heterogeneous Foundation Model Federated Tuning

Digital circuit representation learning has made remarkable progress in electronic design automation, effectively supporting critical tasks such as testability analysis and logic reasoning. However, representation learning for analog circuits remains challenging due to their continuous electrical characteristics compared to the discrete states of digital circuits. This paper presents a direct current (DC) electrically equivalent-oriented analog representation learning framework, named **KCLNet**. We will open-source the dataset and code upon publication. It comprises an asynchronous graph neural network structure with electrically-simulated message passing and a representation learning method inspired by Kirchhoff's Current Law (KCL). This method maintains the orderliness of the circuit embedding space by enforcing the equality of the sum of outgoing and incoming current embeddings at each node, which significantly enhances the generalization ability of circuit embeddings. KCLNet offers a novel and effective solution for analog circuit representation learning with electrical constraints preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance in a variety of downstream tasks, e.g., analog circuit classification, subcircuit detection, and circuit edit distance prediction.

KCLNet: Electrically Equivalence-Oriented Graph Representation Learning for Analog Circuits

Several proof systems for model counting have been introduced in recent years, mainly in an attempt to model #SAT solving and to allow proof logging of solvers. We reexamine these different approaches and show that: 
(i) with slight adaptations, the conceptually quite different proof models of the dynamic system MICE (Fichte, Hecher, and Roland 2022) and the static system of annotated Decision DNNFs (Capelli, Lagniez, and Marquis 2021) are equivalent and 
(ii) they tightly characterise state-of-the-art #SAT solving. 
Thus, these proof systems provide a precise and robust proof-theoretic underpinning of current model counting. We also propose new strengthenings of these proof systems that might lead to stronger model counters.

Proof Systems That Tightly Characterise Model Counting Algorithms

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. As these systems scale in complexity, cost becomes an important consideration for practical deployment. However, existing work rarely addresses how to structure multi-agent systems under explicit budget constraints. In this paper, we propose BAMAS, a novel approach for building multi-agent systems with budget awareness. BAMAS first selects an optimal set of LLMs by formulating and solving an Integer Linear Programming problem that balances performance and cost. It then determines how these LLMs should collaborate by leveraging a reinforcement learning-based method to select the interaction topology. Finally, the system is instantiated and executed based on the selected agents and their collaboration topology. We evaluate BAMAS on three representative tasks and compare it with state-of-the-art agent construction methods. Results show that BAMAS achieves comparable performance while reducing cost by up to 86%.

BAMAS: Structuring Budget-Aware Multi-Agent Systems

We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations.
We focus on envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) — an important fairness notion in fair division of indivisible goods. A central open question in this field is whether EFX allocations always exist for any number of agents. While prior work has established EFX existence for settings with at most three distinct valuations (Prakash HV et al. 2025) and for two types of goods (Gorantla, Marwaha, and Velusamy 2023), the general case remains unresolved.

In this paper, we extend the existent knowledge by proving that EFX allocations satisfying Pareto optimality (PO) always exist and can be computed in quasiliniear time when there are two types of goods, given that the valuations are positive. This result strengthens the existing work of (Gorantla, Marwaha, and Velusamy 2023), which only guarantees the existence of EFX allocations without ensuring Pareto optimality. Our findings demonstrate a fairly simple and efficient algorithm constructing an EFX+PO allocation.

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