Singapore

Recently, structure–text contrastive learning has shown promising performance in text-attributed graph representation by leveraging complementary strengths of graph neural networks and language models. However, existing methods typically rely on homophily assumptions in similarity estimation and hard optimization objectives, leading to inherent limitations when applied to heterophilic graphs. Although some works attempt to mitigate heterophily through structural adjustments or neighbor aggregation, they usually treat textual embeddings as static alignment targets, resulting in suboptimal integration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called GCL-OT: Graph Contrastive Learning with Optimal Transport for Heterophilic Text-Attributed Graphs, enabling flexible and bidirectional alignment between structural and textual signals. Specifically, GCL-OT decomposes heterophily into complete heterophily, partial homophily, and latent homophily, each addressed with tailored optimization mechanisms. For partial heterophily, we design a RealSoftMax-based similarity estimation mechanism to selectively emphasize key neighbor-word interactions while suppressing background noise. For complete heterophily, we introduce a prompt filtering mechanism that adaptively excludes irrelevant noise during optimal transport alignment. Furthermore, we incorporate OT-guided soft supervision to uncover latent neighbors with similarity semantic, enhancing the learning of latent homophily. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmark datasets show that GCL-OT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, verifying its effectiveness and robustness.

AAAI 2026

GCL-OT: Graph Contrastive Learning with Optimal Transport for Heterophilic Text-Attributed Graphs

nlp: (large) language models

social network analysis & community

ml: unsupervised & self-supervised learning

ml: multimodal learning

ml: representation learning

dmkm: graph mining

ml: graph-based machine learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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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.<br><br>

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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 evolving worldly dynamics necessitate continuous revision and updating of knowledge within Large Language Models (LLMs), driving the development of Knowledge Editing (KE) techniques. Recently, a novel paradigm of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) has been proposed, emphasizing that models deployed in dynamic environments should integrate new information while retaining historical knowledge. However, we observe that current definitions and methods for TKE are insufficient, as they do not effectively capture or adapt to the fine-grained temporal dynamics inherent in real-world knowledge evolution. In this paper, we introduce the notion of multi-granularity TKE, encompassing temporal knowledge across yearly, monthly, and daily granularities, and propose a corresponding dataset, named MTKE. We argue that comprehending and retaining knowledge across different temporal granularities is crucial for LLMs to accurately reflect real-world changes. The key challenge lies in integrating new temporal knowledge at various granularities while also preserving relevant historical knowledge, thus ensuring LLMs maintain a consistent and accurate understanding over time. To achieve this, we propose a Sparse Parameter-Injected Knowledge Editing method, dubbed SPIKE, which anchors both temporal knowledge and subject positions within the model. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively preserves historical knowledge performance while accurately incorporating dynamic temporal knowledge across multi-granularity temporal scenarios.

Multi-granularity Temporal Knowledge Editing over Large Language Models

Recent deepfake detection studies often treat unseen sample detection as a "zero-shot" task, training on images generated by known models but generalizing to unknown ones. A key real-world challenge arises when a model performs poorly on unknown samples, yet these samples remain available for analysis. This highlights that it should be approached as a "few-shot" task, where effectively utilizing a small number of samples can lead to significant improvement. Unlike typical few-shot tasks focused on semantic understanding, deepfake detection prioritizes image realism, which closely mirrors real-world distributions. In this work, we propose the Few-shot Training-free Network (FTNet) for real-world few-shot deepfake detection. \textbf{Simple yet effective}, FTNet differs from traditional methods that rely on large-scale known data for training. Instead, FTNet uses \textbf{only one fake sample} from an evaluation set, mimicking the scenario where new samples emerge in the real world and can be gathered for use, without any training or parameter updates. During evaluation, each test sample is compared to the known fake and real samples, and it is classified based on the category of the nearest sample. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of \textbf{AI-generated images from 29 different generative models} and achieve a new SoTA performance, with an average \textbf{improvement of 8.7\%} compared to existing methods. This work introduces a fresh perspective on real-world deepfake detection: when the model struggles to generalize on a few-shot sample, leveraging the failed samples leads to better performance.

Leveraging Failed Samples: A Few-Shot and Training-Free Framework for Generalized Deepfake Detection

Chain-of-Thought prompting has remarkably advanced LLM reasoning by generating explicit step-by-step tokens, yet its discrete nature inherently limits expressiveness and efficiency—struggling with abstract, ambiguous, or semantically divergent cognition beyond linguistic tokens. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by operating in the model’s internal continuous space for richer cognitive representations. However, existing methods typically rely on finetuning or token interpolation to bridge latent and input spaces,
introducing training difficulty or semantic degradation. To this end, we propose Dynamic Latent Reasoning (DyLaR), a training-free framework that preserves semantic fidelity to latent space. DyLaR introduces a Semantic Residual Refinement module that progressively refines latent inputs by integrating semantic residuals from prior hidden states, thus capturing expressive semantic hierarchies that closely approximate continuous latent representations. To enhance flexibility, DyLaR further incorporates a dynamic switching policy
that allows LLMs to alternate between discrete and latent reasoning based on model uncertainty—favoring explicit reasoning when confident, and latent exploration under ambiguity. Empirical experiments across knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks demonstrate that DyLaR consistently outperforms strong baselines in both effectiveness and token efficiency. Qualitative analyses further illustrate its interpretability and flexibility in navigating complex reasoning scenarios.

Beyond Tokens: Dynamic Latent Reasoning via Semantic Residual Refinement

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the safety concerns of their outputs have earned significant attention. Although numerous datasets have been proposed, they may become outdated with MLLM advancements and are susceptible to data contamination issues. To address these problems, we propose SDEval, the first safety dynamic evaluation framework to controllably adjust the distribution and complexity of safety benchmarks. Specifically, SDEval mainly adopts three dynamic strategies: text, image, and text-image dynamics to generate new samples from original benchmarks. We first explore the individual effects of text and image dynamics on model safety. Then, we find that injecting text dynamics into images can further impact safety, and conversely, injecting image dynamics into text also leads to safety risks. SDEval is general enough to be applied to various existing safety and even capability benchmarks. Experiments across safety benchmarks, MLLMGuard and VLSBench, and capability benchmarks, MMBench and MMVet, show that SDEval significantly influences safety evaluation, mitigates data contamination, and exposes safety limitations of MLLMs.

SDEval: Safety Dynamic Evaluation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shifts the contents of retrieval from narrative text to a relational knowledge network, empowering large language models (LLMs) to harness structured relationships between entities. However, conventional KG-RAG approaches are resource-intensive, requiring either query decomposition with multiple LLM rounds or parameterized static knowledge injection to update the model. Although subgraph reasoning aims to address these issues, most current methods are based on heuristic shortest path and multi-hop graph traversal algorithms. The retrieved subgraphs suffer from incompleteness and semantic drift, and neglect the interaction between subgraph and LLMs in terms of fine-grained structural semantics. We propose a dual-constraint subgraph optimization for KG-RAG (DCTR). It improves subgraph retrieval and generates high-quality subgraphs with structural integrity and information salience for LLMs. Specifically, it formulates subgraph generation as a two-stage graph-theoretic constrained optimization problem to create compact and complete pseudo-labels. Since these pseudo-labels are discrete, a smooth approximation is employed to convert them into a differentiable representation, thereby optimizing the retriever to highlight key information while extracting subgraphs. On two benchmark datasets, DCTR significantly enhances subgraph quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance in LLM reasoning.

DCTR: Dual-Constraint Subgraph Optimization for Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

While Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their ability to interpret abstract visual inputs remains limited. Specifically, they struggle to comprehend hand-drawn sketches, a modality that offers an intuitive means of expressing concepts that are difficult to describe textually. We identify the primary bottleneck as the absence of a large-scale dataset that jointly models sketches, photorealistic images, and corresponding natural language instructions. To address this, we present two key contributions: (1) a new, large-scale dataset of image-sketch-instruction triplets designed to facilitate both pretraining and instruction tuning, and (2) O3SLM, an LVLM trained on this dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple sketch-based tasks: (a) object localization, (b) counting, (c) image retrieval i.e., (SBIR and fine-grained SBIR), and (d) visual question answering (VQA); while incorporating the three existing sketch datasets, namely QuickDraw!, Sketchy, and Tu-Berlin, along with our generated SketchVCL dataset, show that O3SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming existing LVLMs in sketch comprehension and reasoning.

O3SLM: Open Weight, Open Data, and Open Vocabulary Sketch-Language Model

Efficient reference structures are essential in video compression, enabling the exploitation of temporal dependencies across frames to reduce redundancy. In this paper, we delve into the inter-frame reference management mechanism in neural video codecs (NVCs). Previous schemes have inherited the reference propagation mechanism with the guidance of predefined reference structure, but the reference modeling across diverse reference sources remains underexplored. Moreover, the mismatch between the reference structure used for motion estimation and motion compensation limits the effectiveness of inter-frame prediction. To address the above limitations, we propose the unified reference hierarchy that integrates a learned hierarchical reference structure into the existing inherent reference propagation mechanism. Specifically, we first propose the hierarchical reference structure (HRS) to manage the multiple temporal contexts in the propagated reference feature, where a hierarchy-aware reference modulation module is integrated to select the most relevant reference features across different quality levels under the guidance of the reference balance loss. In addition, we propose the HRS-guided feature-wise inter-frame prediction that learns the low-rank approximation of the selected reference feature for ensuring the consistency and improving the inter-frame prediction performance. We conduct experiments on a state-of-the-art NVC, DCVC-DC. Experimental results show that our codec achieves an average 26\% bitrate saving over H.266/VVC, and a 28.2\% bitrate reduction compared to DCVC-DC without increasing the decoding complexity.

Neural Video Compression with Reference Hierarchy

3D human motion generation has seen a substantial rise in interest over the recent years, and while considerable progress has been made performance wise, many of the approaches in the state-of-the-art still struggle with complex and detailed generations unseen in the original data. This is commonly attributed to the scarcity of available motion datasets, and the prohibitive cost for generating more training examples. Motivated by this set of challenges, we introduce CoMA, A multimodal framework designed for complex human motion generation, editing and comprehension. CoMA employs multiple independent agents, powered by large language and vision models, as well as a mask transformer-based motion generator with body part specific encoders and codebooks for fine-grained, detailed generations. This recipe allows for generation of short and long motion sequences with detailed instructions, editing generations with user provided text instructions and also self-correcting output sequences for even better motions. We evaluate our method with the two most popular benchmark human motion datasets, using novel splits that separate them into basic and complex actions, and subsequently compare CoMA's performance with state-of-the-art methods.

CoMA: Compositional Human Motion Generation with Multi-modal Agents

3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) is vital in various applications, from person re-identification and action recognition to virtual reality. However, the reliance on annotated 3D data collected in controlled environments poses challenges for generalization to diverse in-the-wild scenarios. Existing domain adaptation (DA) paradigms like general DA and source-free DA for 3D HPE overlook the issues of non-stationary target pose datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a novel task named lifelong domain adaptive 3D HPE. To our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the lifelong domain adaptation to the 3D HPE task. In this lifelong DA setting, the pose estimator is pretrained on the source domain and subsequently adapted to distinct target domains. Moreover, during adaptation to the current target domain, the pose estimator cannot access the source and all the previous target domains. The lifelong DA for 3D HPE involves overcoming challenges in adapting to current domain poses and preserving knowledge from previous domains, particularly combating catastrophic forgetting. We present an innovative Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework, which incorporates 3D pose generators, a 2D pose discriminator, and a 3D pose estimator. This framework effectively mitigates domain shifts and aligns original and augmented poses. Moreover, we construct a novel 3D pose generator paradigm, integrating pose-aware, temporal-aware, and domain-aware knowledge to enhance the current domain's adaptation and alleviate catastrophic forgetting on previous domains. Our method demonstrates superior performance through extensive experiments on diverse domain adaptive 3D HPE datasets.

Lifelong Domain Adaptive 3D Human Pose Estimation

Generating editable 3D CAD geometry from natural language remains an open challenge: existing text-to-CAD systems either output surface meshes or require scarce design-history supervision, making them unsuitable for real-world engineering workflows. We introduce NURBGen, the first framework for generating high-fidelity 3D CAD models directly from natural language descriptions using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS). To achieve this, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to translate free-form texts into JSON representations containing NURBS surface parameters (\textit{i.e}, control points, knot vectors, degrees, and rational weights) which can be directly converted into BRep format using Python. Furthermore, we introduce partABC, a curated subset of the ABC dataset consisting of individual CAD components, annotated with detailed captions using an automated annotation pipeline. We further propose a hybrid representation that combines untrimmed NURBS with analytic primitives to handle trimmed surfaces and degenerate regions more robustly, while reducing token complexity. NURBGen demonstrates strong performance on diverse prompts, surpassing prior methods in geometric fidelity and dimensional accuracy, as confirmed by expert evaluations. Code and dataset will be released publicly.

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