Singapore

Large language models hold great promise for transforming K–12 education, but there is an urgent need for systematic evaluation of their core educational capabilities. Existing benchmarks often overlook educational goal cognition and overemphasize answer accuracy, thereby failing to capture deeper subject-level knowledge ability and problem-solving ability. To address this gap, we introduce K-12EduBench: a benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ subject-level knowledge ability, subject-specific problem-solving ability, and educational goal cognition ability in K–12 education. K-12EduBench comprises four components: (1) a dataset of 2,640 objective and 619 subjective questions across nine subjects, annotated with answers, problem-solving processes, and cognitive-level labels; (2) nine Item Response Theory (IRT) models for estimating subject-level knowledge ability; (3) evaluation methods and metrics for assessing multi-step problem-solving ability; and (4) prompts and scoring rubrics for measuring alignment with target cognitive levels. Experiments on advanced LLMs show that education-optimized models consistently outperform general-purpose ones across all three abilities, while under-scaled models lag substantially. We observe a strong positive correlation between subject-level knowledge ability and subject-specific problem-solving ability. Despite gains in educational goal cognition ability, current models—even those tailored for education—still fall short of real-world instructional needs. All code and data will be released publicly.

AAAI 2026

K-12EduBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Knowledge, Problem-Solving, and Educational Goal Cognition in K-12 Education

app:other applications

nlp: (large) language models

and evaluation of nlp models

nlp: interpretability

nlp: applications

analysis

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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.

Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents capable of tackling a variety of tasks. However, generalizing to new goals in different environments remains a central challenge for goal-conditioned RL agents. Existing methods often rely on state abstraction, which involves learning abstracted state representations by excluding irrelevant features, to improve generalization. Despite their success in simplified settings, these methods often fail to generalize effectively to realistic environments with varied goals.
In this work, we propose to enhance generalization through state abstraction from the perspective of causal inference. 
We hypothesize that the generalization gap arises in part due to unobserved confounders: latent variables that simultaneously influence both the global and goal states. To address this, we introduce Deconfounded State Abstraction for Policy learning (DSAP), a novel framework that mitigates backdoor confounding by employing a learned causal graph as a *proxy* for the hidden confounders.
We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that DSAP improves both the learning process and the generalization capability of goal-conditioned policies. Extensive experiments across different settings of multiple benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

DSAP: Enhancing Generalization in Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Automatic real personality recognition (RPR) aims to evaluate human real personality traits from their expressive behaviours. However, most existing solutions generally act as external observers to infer observers' personality impressions based on target individuals' expressive behaviours, which significantly deviate from their real personalities and consistently lead to inferior recognition performance. Inspired by the association between real personality and human internal cognition underlying the generation of expressive behaviours, we propose a novel RPR approach that efficiently simulates personalised internal cognition from easy-accessible external short audio-visual behaviours expressed by the target individual. The simulated personalised cognition, represented as a set of network weights that enforce the personalised network to reproduce the individual-specific facial reactions, is further encoded as a novel graph containing two-dimensional node and edge feature matrices, with a novel 2D Graph Neural Network (2D-GNN) proposed for inferring real personality traits from it. To simulate real personality-related cognition, an end-to-end strategy is designed to jointly train our cognition simulation, 2D graph construction, and personality recognition modules. Experiments show our approach’s effectiveness in capturing real personality traits with superior computational efficiency. Our code is provided in Supplementary Material.

Learning Personalised Human Internal Cognition from External Expressive Behaviours for Real Personality Recognition

Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, self-explainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.

CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are increasingly deployed on numerous critical applications, where users rely on auto-generated summaries while casually skimming the video stream. We show that this interaction hides a critical safety gap: if harmful content is embedded in a video, either as full-frame inserts or as small corner patches, state-of-the-art VideoLLMs rarely mention the harmful content in the output, despite its clear visibility to human viewers. A root-cause analysis reveals three compounding design flaws: (1) insufficient temporal coverage resulting from the sparse, uniformly spaced frame sampling used by most leading VideoLLMs, (2) spatial information loss introduced by aggressive token downsampling within sampled frames, and (3) encoder-decoder disconnection, whereby visual cues are only weakly utilized during text generation. Leveraging these insights, we craft three zero-query black-box attacks, aligning with these flaws in the processing pipeline. Our large-scale evaluation across five leading VideoLLMs shows that the harmfulness omission rate exceeds 90% in most cases. Even when harmful content is clearly present in all frames, these models consistently fail to identify it. These results underscore a fundamental vulnerability in current VideoLLMs' designs and highlight the urgent need for sampling strategies, token compression, and decoding mechanisms that guarantee semantic coverage rather than speed alone. This paper contains content that is offensive.

Failures to Surface Harmful Contents in Video Large Language Models

We introduce LOG-Nav, an efficient layout-aware object-goal navigation approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. 
By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, LOG-Nav achieves both efficient and effective navigation.
The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training.
Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85\% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79\% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40\% point improvement in SR and 60\% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios. See https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOG-Navi-012C/ for details.

LOG-Nav: Efficient Layout-Aware Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in graph classification tasks. However, their performance often deteriorates under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts, such as variations in graph structures, sizes, and node attributes. While several methods have been proposed to address this issue, a significant challenge remains in explicitly identifying the key components of a graph. To tackle this, we introduce CauVQ, a novel causal vector quantization method that enhances OOD generalization by explicitly identifying and leveraging causally relevant substructures. Our method first decomposes each graph into local subgraphs and quantizes them into a discrete codebook of prototypical substructures, enabling more stable and interpretable representations. To isolate truly causal substructures, we maximize their mutual information with graph labels and refine their representations through a learnable substructure interaction matrix and a causal attention mask, effectively suppressing spurious correlations. Furthermore, we design a counterfactual regularizer that enforces prediction stability under substructure perturbations, encouraging the model to focus on causal patterns rather than shortcuts. Extensive experiments on both standard and OOD graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that CauVQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and interpretability. Our framework offers a promising step towards reliable and explainable graph learning under distribution shifts.

CauVQ: Causal Vector Quantization for Graph OOD Generalization

Dataset distillation compresses large datasets into compact synthetic ones to reduce storage and computational costs. Among various approaches, distribution matching (DM)-based methods have attracted attention for their high efficiency. However, they often overlook the evolution of feature representations during training, which limits the expressiveness of synthetic data and weakens downstream performance.
To address this issue, we propose Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation (TGDD), which reformulates distribution matching as a dynamic alignment process along the model’s training trajectory. At each training stage, TGDD captures evolving semantics by aligning the feature distribution between the synthetic and original dataset. Meanwhile, it introduces a distribution constraint regularization to reduce class overlap. This design helps synthetic data preserve both semantic diversity and representativeness, improving performance in downstream tasks. Without additional optimization overhead, TGDD achieves a favorable balance between performance and efficiency. Experiments on ten datasets demonstrate that TGDD achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably a 5.0\% accuracy gain on high-resolution benchmarks. Our source code will be publicly available at http://github.com/ddrd999/TGDD.

TGDD: Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation with Balanced Distribution

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced to encompass extensive knowledge across diverse domains. Yet controlling what a LLMs should not know is important for ensuring alignment and thus safe use. However, effective unlearning in LLMs is difficult due to the fuzzy boundary between knowledge retention and forgetting. This challenge is exacerbated by entangled parameter spaces from continuous multi-domain training, often resulting in collateral damage, especially under aggressive unlearning strategies. Furthermore, the computational overhead required to optimize State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models with billions of parameters poses an additional barrier. In this work, we present **ALTER**, a lightweight unlearning framework for LLMs to address both the challenges of knowledge entanglement and unlearning efficiency. ALTER operates through two phases: (I) high entropy tokens are captured and learned via the shared A matrix in LoRA, followed by (II) an asymmetric LoRA architecture that achieves a specified forgetting objective by parameter isolation and unlearning tokens within the target subdomains. Serving as a new research direction for achieving unlearning via token-level isolation in the asymmetric framework. ALTER achieves SOTA performance on TOFU, WMDP, and MUSE benchmarks with over 95% forget quality and shows minimal side effects through preserving foundational tokens. By decoupling unlearning from LLMs' billion-scale parameters, this framework delivers excellent efficiency while preserving over 90% of model utility, exceeding baseline preservation rates of 47.8-83.6%.

ALTER: Asymmetric LoRA for Token-Entropy-Guided Unlearning of LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Large Language Models (LLMs), where adversaries can embed hidden triggers to manipulate LLM's outputs. 
Most existing defense methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, are ineffective against the autoregressive nature and vast output space of LLMs, thereby suffering from poor performance and high latency. 
To address these limitations, we investigate the behavioral discrepancies between benign and backdoored LLMs in output space.
We identify a critical phenomenon which we term sequence lock: a backdoored model generates the target sequence with abnormally high and consistent confidence compared to benign generation. 
Building on this insight, we propose $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$, a lightweight and effective detection method that monitors a sliding window of token confidences to identify sequence lock. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$ achieves a near 100\% true positive rate (TPR) and a negligible false positive rate (FPR) in the vast majority of cases.
Crucially, the $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$ enables real-time detection almost without additional latency, making it a practical backdoor defense for real-world LLM deployments.

ConfGuard: A Simple and Effective Backdoor Detection for Large Language Models

Moving infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a critical role in practical applications, such as surveillance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and UAV-based search system. Moving IRSTD still remains highly challenging due to weak target features and complex background interference. Accurate spatio-temporal feature modeling is crucial for moving target detection, typically achieved through either temporal differences or spatio-temporal (3D) convolutions. Temporal difference can explicitly leverage motion cues but exhibits limited capability in extracting spatial features, whereas 3D convolution effectively represents spatio-temporal features yet lacks explicit awareness of motion dynamics along the temporal dimension. In this paper, we propose a novel moving IRSTD network (TDCNet), which effectively extracts and enhances spatio-temporal features for accurate target detection. Specifically, we introduce a novel temporal difference convolution (TDC) re-parameterization module that comprises three parallel TDC blocks designed to capture contextual dependencies across different temporal ranges. Each TDC block fuses temporal difference and 3D convolution into a unified spatio-temporal convolution representation. This re-parameterized module can effectively capture multi-scale motion contextual features while suppressing pseudo-motion clutter in complex backgrounds, significantly improving detection performance. Moreover, we propose a TDC-guided spatio-temporal attention mechanism that performs cross-attention between the spatio-temporal features extracted from the TDC-based backbone and a parallel 3D backbone. This mechanism models their global semantic dependencies to refine the current frame’s features, thereby guiding the model to focus more accurately on critical target regions. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we construct a new challenging benchmark, IRSTD-UAV, consisting of 15,106 real infrared images with diverse low signal-to-clutter ratio scenarios and complex backgrounds. Extensive experiments on IRSTD-UAV and public infrared datasets demonstrate that our TDCNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in moving target detection. Dataset and source code will be released upon acceptance.

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