Singapore

Recent advances in differentiable structure learning have framed the combinatorial problem of learning directed acyclic graphs as a continuous optimization problem. Various aspects, including data standardization, have been studied to identify factors that influence the empirical performance of these methods. In this work, we investigate critical limitations in differentiable structure learning methods, focusing on settings where the true structure can be identified up to Markov equivalence classes, particularly in the linear Gaussian case. While recent work highlighted potential non-convexity issues in this setting, we demonstrate and explain why the use of $\ell_1$-penalized likelihood in such cases is fundamentally inconsistent, even if the global optimum of the optimization problem can be found. To resolve this limitation, we develop a hybrid differentiable structure learning method based on $\ell_0$-penalized likelihood with hard acyclicity constraint, where the $\ell_0$ penalty can be approximated by different techniques including Gumbel-Softmax. Specifically, we first estimate the underlying moral graph, and use it to restrict the search space of the optimization problem, which helps alleviate the non-convexity issue. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances empirical performance both before and after data standardization, providing a more reliable path for future advancements in differentiable structure learning, especially for learning Markov equivalence classes.

AAAI 2026

Revisiting Differentiable Structure Learning: Inconsistency of L1 Penalty and Beyond

moral graph

acyclicity constraint

l0-penalized likelihood

differentiable structure learning

ml: probabilistic circuits and graphical models

ml: causal learning

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.

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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.

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.

With the rapid advancement of mathematical reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), AI systems are increasingly being adopted in educational settings to support students’ comprehension of problem-solving processes. However, a critical component remains underexplored in current LLM-generated explanations: multimodal explanation. In real-world instructional contexts, human tutors routinely employ visual aids, such as diagrams, markings, and highlights, to enhance conceptual clarity. To bridge this gap, we introduce the multimodal solution explanation task, designed to evaluate whether models can identify visual keypoints, such as auxiliary lines, points, angles, and generate explanations that incorporate these key elements essential for understanding. To evaluate model performance on this task, we propose ME2, a multimodal benchmark consisting of 1,000 math problems annotated with visual keypoints and corresponding explanatory text that references those elements. Our empirical results show that, aside from recent large-scale open-source and closed-source models, most generalist open-source models, and even math-specialist models, struggle with the multimodal solution explanation task. This highlights a significant gap in current LLMs’ ability to perform visually grounded reasoning and provide explanations in educational contexts. We expect that the multimodal solution explanation task and the ME2 dataset will catalyze further research on LLMs in education and promote their use as effective, explanation-oriented AI tutors. Code and data will be released publicly.

Explain with Visual Keypoints Like a Real Mentor! A Benchmark for Multimodal Solution Explanation

Multimodal learning, while contributing to numerous success stories across various fields, faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive manual annotation. To address the scarcity of annotated data, a popular solution is unsupervised domain adaptation, which has been extensively studied in unimodal settings yet remains less explored in multimodal settings. In this paper, we investigate heterogeneous multimodal domain adaptation, where the primary challenge is the varying domain shifts of different modalities from the source to the target domain. We first introduce the information bottleneck method to learn representations for each modality independently, and then match the source and target domains in the representation space with correlation alignment. To balance the domain alignment of all modalities, we formulate the problem as a multi-objective task, aiming for a Pareto optimal solution. By exploiting the properties specific to our model, the problem can be simplified to a quadratic programming problem. Further approximation yields a closed-form solution, leading to an efficient modality-balanced multimodal domain adaptation algorithm. The proposed method features \textbf{B}alanced multi-\textbf{o}bjective \textbf{o}ptimization for \textbf{m}ultimodal \textbf{d}omain \textbf{a}daptation, termed \textbf{Boomda}. Extensive empirical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate that Boomda outperforms the competing schemes. The code is included in the supplementary material.

Boomda: Balanced Multi-objective Optimization for Multimodal Domain Adaptation

Joint rendering and deformation of mesh and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significant value as both representations offer complementary advantages for graphics applications.
However, due to differences in representation and rendering pipelines, existing studies render meshes and 3DGS separately, making it difficult to accurately handle occlusions.
Moreover, the deformed 3DGS still suffers from visual artifacts due to the sensitivity to the topology quality of the proxy mesh.
These issues pose serious obstacles to the joint use of 3DGS and meshes, making it difficult to adapt 3DGS to conventional mesh-oriented graphics pipelines.
We propose UniMGS, the first unified framework for rasterizing mesh and 3DGS in a single-pass anti-aliased manner, with a novel binding strategy for 3DGS deformation based on proxy mesh.
Our key insight is to blend the colors of both triangle and Gaussian fragments by anti-aliased $\alpha$-blending in a single pass, achieving visually coherent results with precise handling of occlusion and transparency.
To improve the visual appearance of the deformed 3DGS, our Gaussian-centric binding strategy employs a proxy mesh and spatially associates Gaussians with the mesh faces, significantly reducing rendering artifacts.
With these two components, UniMGS enables the visualization and manipulation of 3D objects represented by mesh or 3DGS within a unified framework, opening up new possibilities in embodied AI, virtual reality, and gaming.
We will release our source code to facilitate further research.

UniMGS: Unifying Mesh and 3D Gaussian Splatting with Single-Pass Rasterization and Proxy-Based Deformation

Large language model (LLM)-based visual dialogue (VD) systems have made response generation for image-grounded conversations more correct and coherent. However, user engagement - the extent to which a user is interested, emotionally involved, and willing to continue the conversation - remains a challenge. To fully explore engaging VD, we propose: (i) a new task named Audio-enhanced VD (AVD), which introduces additional audio dialogue contexts that can more vividly convey the speaker's emotions as input, with the aim of generating correct but more engaging dialogue responses. Specifically, we employ a text-to-speech model as the modality translator to generate the paired acoustic utterances from the inputting textual utterances; (ii) an accompanying approach named Visually-grounded and Interleaved Text-Audio Dialogue Modeling (VITA-DM), which utilizes both image-grounded information and interleaved text-audio utterances for visual dialogue modeling, differentiating from previous multi-modal LLM (MLLM)-based methods that normally model text and audio modalities separately. We also present three pre-training tasks to better learn multi-modal interactions across language, vision, and audio; (iii) a novel metric named Multi-Modal Engagement (MME), which fills the gap of engagement estimation in VD and can provide a fine-grained assessment along emotional, attentional, and reply engagement dimensions (EE, AE, RE). We experiment on two popular datasets and provide extensive evaluations (automatic, engagement-specific, and human), supporting the validity of our approach. Furthermore, based on empirical results that reveal that emotions contribute the most to engagement, we justify our emphasis on the emotional aspect throughout the definition, solution, and evaluation of our task.

Making Visual Dialogue More Engaging: A New Task, Method, and Metric

As a data-driven learning approach, model-based offline reinforcement learning (MORL) aims to learn a policy by exploiting a dynamics model derived from an existing dataset. Applying conservative quantification to the dynamics model, most existing works on MORL generate trajectories that approximate the real data distribution to facilitate policy learning. However, these methods typically overlook the influence of historical information on environmental dynamics, thus generating unreliable trajectories that fail to align with the true data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new MORL algorithm called Reliability-guaranteed and Reward-seeking Transformer (RT). RT can avoid generating unreliable trajectories through the calculation of cumulative reliability of the trajectories, which is a weighted variational distance between the generated trajectory distribution and the true data distribution.
Moreover, by sampling candidate actions with high rewards, RT can efficiently generate high-reward trajectories from the existing offline data, thereby further facilitating policy learning. We theoretically prove the performance guarantees of RT in policy learning, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness against state-of-the-art model-based methods on several offline benchmark tasks and a large-scale industrial dataset from an on-demand food delivery platform.

Reliability-Guaranteed and Reward-Seeking Sequence Modeling for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

RNA inverse folding, designing sequences to form specific 3D structures, is critical for therapeutics, gene regulation, and synthetic biology. Current methods, focused on sequence recovery, struggle to address structural objectives like secondary structure consistency (SS), minimum free energy (MFE), and local distance difference test (LDDT), leading to suboptimal structural accuracy. To tackle this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework integrated with a latent diffusion model (LDM). Drawing inspiration from the success of diffusion models in RNA inverse folding, which adeptly model complex sequence-structure interactions, we develop an LDM incorporating pre-trained RNA-FM embeddings from a large-scale RNA model. These embeddings capture co-evolutionary patterns, markedly improving sequence recovery accuracy. However, existing approaches, including diffusion-based methods, cannot effectively handle non-differentiable structural objectives. By contrast, RL excels in this task by using policy-driven reward optimization to navigate complex, non-gradient-based objectives, offering a significant advantage over traditional methods. In summary, we propose the Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model (SOLD), a novel RL framework that optimizes single-step noise without sampling the full diffusion trajectory, achieving efficient refinement of multiple structural objectives. Experimental results demonstrate SOLD surpasses its LDM baseline and state-of-the-art methods across all metrics, establishing a robust framework for RNA inverse folding with profound implications for biotechnological and therapeutic applications.

Structure-based RNA Design by Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model

Fine-grained image-text alignment is a pivotal challenge in multimodal learning, underpinning key applications such as visual question answering, image captioning, and vision-language navigation. Unlike global alignment, fine-grained alignment requires precise correspondence between localized visual regions and textual tokens, often hindered by noisy attention mechanisms and oversimplified modeling of cross-modal relationships. In this work, we identify two fundamental limitations of existing approaches: the lack of robust intra-modal mechanisms to assess the significance of visual and textual tokens, leading to poor generalization in complex scenes; and the absence of fine-grained uncertainty modeling, which fails to capture the one-to-many and many-to-one nature of region-token correspondences. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework that incorporates significance-aware and granularity-aware modeling and region-level uncertainty modeling. Our method leverages modality-specific biases to identify salient features without relying on brittle cross-modal attention, and represents region features as a mixture of Gaussian distributions to capture fine-grained uncertainty. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various backbone architectures, significantly enhancing the robustness and interpretability of fine-grained image-text alignment.

Cross Modal Fine-grained Alignment via Granularity-aware and Region-uncertain Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in hardware description language (HDL) generation. However, existing approaches often rely on free-form natural language descriptions that are often ambiguous, redundant, and unstructured, which poses significant challenges for downstream Verilog code generation. We treat hardware code generation as a complex transformation from an open-ended natural language space to a domain-specific, highly constrained target space. To bridge this gap, we introduce Core Refined Understanding eXpression (CRUX), a structured intermediate space that captures the essential semantics of user intent while organizing the expression for precise Verilog code generation. We further design a two-stage training framework, comprising Joint Expression Modeling and Dual-Space Optimization, to enhance the quality of both CRUX and Verilog code. Experiments across multiple Verilog generation benchmarks demonstrate that our model, QiMeng-CRUX-V, achieves state-of-the-art performance among general models, particularly under challenging design tasks. Furthermore, the CRUX space proves transferable and beneficial when used as input prompts for other code models, highlighting its effectiveness in narrowing the gap between free-form natural language descriptions and precise Verilog generation.

QiMeng-CRUX: Narrowing the Gap Between Natural Language and Verilog via Core Refined Understanding eXpression

Knowledge distillation based on large vision-language models (VLMs) has recently emerged as a significant solution to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tasks. However, existing methods employ a two-stage training pipeline, which not only complicates the training procedure but also lacks interactions between the source and target domains, severely hindering real-time cross-domain knowledge transfer. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{E}nd-to-End \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{D}istillation for UD\textbf{A} with large VLMs (termed as EKDA). (1) EKDA employs a lightweight prompt learning mechanism to first embed the knowledge from the source domain into VLMs, and then simultaneously utilize the image encoder and text encoder of VLMs to perform knowledge distillation on the target domain, significantly reducing the domain gap. (2) EKDA designs a teacher-student alternating training strategy to implement real-time collaborative interactions across domains, enabling an end-to-end paradigm to provide accurate source domain-aware supervision for the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 widely recognized benchmark datasets including Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA-2017, and Mini-DomainNet. Experimental results demonstrate that EKDA achieves significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art UDA approaches, while maintaining a much lower model complexity. Take Office-Home for example, EKDA has gained at least 2.7\% performance improvement while reducing the learnable parameters by over 80\% compared with the strongest baselines. The code is available at \textcolor{blue}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EKDA}.

End-to-End Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Large Vision-language Models

3D semantic segmentation serves as a fundamental component in many applications, such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Although recent methods have advanced the field, adapting these methods to new environments or object categories without extensive retraining remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce xMHashSeg, a novel training-free cross-modal LiDAR semantic segmentation framework. xMHashSeg leverages foundation models and non-parametric network to extract features from 2D images and 3D point clouds, subsequently integrating these features through hash learning. Specifically, We develop point-SANN, a novel self-adaption non-parametric network that can extract robust 3D features from raw point clouds, while 2D features are directly extracted through the foundation model DINOv2. To reconcile inconsistencies across different modals, we introduce a Hash Code Learning Module that projects all information into a common hash space, learning a consistent hash code that enhances feature integration. Additionally, depth maps are utilized as an intermediary form between 2D and 3D data to facilitate convergence during hash code learning. Our experimental results on various multi-modality datasets demonstrate that xMHashSeg outperforms zero-shot learning approaches and achieve performance close to that of unsupervised domain adaptation and test-time adaptation methods, without requiring any annotations or additional training.

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Explain with Visual Keypoints Like a Real Mentor! A Benchmark for Multimodal Solution Explanation

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