Singapore

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) suffers from an inherent mismatch between coarse image-level annotations and dense pixel-level predictions. To bridge this gap, existing methods primarily focus on generating refined class activation maps (CAM) as pseudo-labels. However, we argue that this focus is insufficient as it overlooks a critical component: the segmentation decoder. The decoder is typically trained through superficial alignment of predictions with pseudo-labels in the logit space. Given the noisy nature of such labels, this naive supervision leads to error accumulation and limits performance. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning (UGRL) framework that exerts dual control to reshape the learning process, achieving robust supervision that escapes the CAM shadow. The cornerstone of UGRL is a prototype-driven uncertainty modeling module that estimates the reliability of class-wise supervision. The modeled uncertainty enables two synergistic control mechanisms. First, it adaptively modulates classification and segmentation losses, encouraging the model to learn from more trustworthy signals. Second, it guides the structuring of the decoder’s feature space. Rather than relying solely on superficial alignment, UGRL enforces deeper representation alignment by applying contrastive learning on reliable pixels. This enables rich semantic transfer to fine-grained segmentation details. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method surpasses other state-of-the-art WSSS methods. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UGRL-70C3/.

AAAI 2026

Escaping the CAM Shadow: Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

uncertainty quantification

segmentation

computer vision

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

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.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

Educational recommendation systems have been a fundamental component for alleviating learning disorientation in self-paced learning. While existing studies mainly leverage cognitive theories to guide learning motivation modeling, they critically overlook the role of social influences. Through empirical analysis, we identify social homophily as an additional driver of learning behaviors, i.e., learners tend to adopt resources validated by their social cohort. However, two challenges impede effective social homophily modeling: (1) the absence and sparsity of predefined social relations in online education, and (2) the deep entanglement of social homophily with cognitive homophily in behavioral data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a graph-based framework EdGCL that explicitly disentangles social homophily and cognitive homophily. EdGCL infers implicit social relations from learners' social behaviors and encodes them via a graph transformer, generating social-view representations. Simultaneously, it constructs a heterogeneous learning graph to model cognitive homophily, which is enhanced by a type-aware aggregator and cognitive diagnosis loss. To ensure the semantic distinctiveness of dual-view homophily modeling, a cross-view contrastive disentanglement mechanism is designed to pull intra-view representations closer while pushing inter-view representations away. Evaluation on two real-world educational datasets demonstrates the superior recommendation performance of EdGCL, highlighting the necessity of dual homophily modeling for understanding the motivations behind learning behaviors.

EdGCL: Disentangling Social and Cognitive Homophily in Graph-Based Educational Recommender Systems

Introducing AI concepts in the earliest years of schooling
can help children make sense of intelligent technologies,
yet few resources exist for K–2 classrooms. This paper
presents the design and outcomes of a professional
development (PD) program supporting K–2 teachers as they
explored AI literacy and co-designed unplugged classroom
activities. Grounded in AI4K12’s Five Big Ideas in AI
framework, the PD combined hands-on learning, collaborative
design, and micro-teaching opportunities. Educators created
screen-free, English Language Arts (ELA)-aligned activities
using storytelling, sorting, and embodied play to introduce
AI topics such as machine learning and fairness in
age-appropriate ways. Sample lessons included Train the AI
(pattern recognition), What Happens Next? (equity in
algorithmic decisions), Who Did the Robot Hear? (data
diversity and voice recognition), and Teach the Robot
(guided data-labeling). The PD emphasized integrating AI
into existing K–2 literacy routines, lowering
implementation barriers while supporting vocabulary
development, reasoning, and empathy. Teacher reflections
revealed growing confidence in adapting AI topics for young
learners and highlighted the value of peer collaboration,
clear language, and tactile materials. This work
contributes to the emerging field of early AI education by
demonstrating how co-design and unplugged formats can
empower teachers to introduce foundational AI concepts
through inquiry, play, and literacy-rich (ELA) experiences.

Co-Designing Unplugged Learning Activities with K-2 Teachers for Early AI Literacy Education

LiDAR-based 3D object detection models often struggle to generalize to real-world environments due to limited object diversity in existing datasets. To tackle it, we introduce the first generalized cross-domain few-shot (GCFS) task in 3D object detection, aiming to adapt a source-pretrained model to both common and novel classes in a new domain with only few-shot annotations. We propose a unified framework that learns stable target semantics under limited supervision by bridging 2D open-set semantics with 3D spatial reasoning. Specifically, an image-guided multi-modal fusion module injects transferable 2D semantic cues into the 3D detection pipeline via vision-language models, while a physically-aware box search enhances 2D-to-3D alignment via LiDAR priors. To capture class-specific semantics from sparse data, we further introduce contrastive-enhanced prototype learning, which encodes few-shot instances into discriminative semantic anchors and stabilizes representation learning. Extensive experiments on four GCFS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach in realistic deployment settings. The code will be publicly available.

From Dataset to Real-world: General 3D Object Detection via Generalized Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

With the growing adoption of Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS), Private Inference (PI) has emerged as a promising solution to address its security concerns through cryptographic techniques. However, nonlinear operations in neural networks contribute the majority of the computational and communication overhead in PI. Existing studies mainly focus on optimizing and reducing the number of ReLU activations in neural networks,but traditional pruning methods may mistakenly remove ReLUs that are critical for maintaining model accuracy. To accurately evaluate the importance of ReLU in the network, we propose ReLUPruner, a method that uses Taylor expansion to accurately quantify the impact on loss before and after ReLU replacement. Furthermore, we establish a hierarchical importance metric to guide layer-wise ReLU budget allocation and adopt a progressive pruning strategy to dynamically adjust the pruning rate of each layer according to the training progress. Extensive experiments on various models and datasets show that ReLUPruner achieves a good balance between ReLU budget and model accuracy, with a 1.89\% improvement over the existing SOTA method 1.89\% (90.12\%, 12.9k ReLU budget, CIFAR10), 3.62\% (77.9\% 50k ReLU budget, CIFAR100) and 2.66\% (56.13\%,30k ReLU budget, Tiny-ImageNet), while achieving superior accuracy even without additional fine-tuning stage.

ReLUPruner: Rethinking ReLU Importance with Taylor Expansion for Efficient Private Inference

Precise detection of driver mental fatigue is critical for reducing traffic accidents and enhancing road safety. Compared with vision-based detection—which is susceptible to illumination and occlusion—multimodal physiological‑signal-based approaches integrate complementary information from diverse biosignals, delivering more faithful and objective fatigue assessments. However, adverse factors such as motion artifacts and environmental noise induce ceaseless deterioration to physiological signals, which markedly degrade the performance of existing multimodal fusion methods. To address this challenge, we propose Multimodal Uncertainty-based Self-driven Evolution, MUSE, reallocating modality contributions in real time via overall uncertainty minimization, thereby enabling efficient collaborative fusion of multi‐source predictions. Theoretically, MUSE guarantees a provably bounded cumulative error, and its generalization error approaches the Bayesian‑optimal fusion as iterations progress. Operating in a closed loop without labels or manual recalibration, MUSE presents superior suitability for real‑world driving scenarios compared to supervised algorithms. On the large‑scale driving fatigue dataset SEED‑VIG, MUSE outperforms existing models in both classification (92.2\% accuracy) and regression tasks, substantiating its robustness and practicality as a promising driving fatigue detection solution.

MUSE: Multimodal Uncertainty-Based Self-Driven Evolution for Robust Physiological-Signal–Based Driver Fatigue Detection

Gaussian Processes (GPs), as a nonparametric learning method, offer flexible modeling capabilities and calibrated uncertainty quantification for function approximations. Additionally, GPs support online learning by efficiently incorporating new data with polynomial-time computation, making them well-suited for safety-critical dynamical systems that require rapid adaptation. However, the inference and online updates of exact GPs, when processing streaming data, incur cubic computation time and quadratic storage memory complexity, limiting their scalability to large datasets in real-time settings. In this paper, we propose a streaming kernel-induced progressively generated expert framework of Gaussian processes (SkyGP) that addresses both computational and memory constraints by maintaining a bounded set of experts, while inheriting the learning performance guarantees from exact Gaussian processes. Furthermore, two SkyGP variants are introduced, each tailored to a specific objective, either maximizing prediction accuracy (SkyGP-Dense) or improving computational efficiency (SkyGP-Fast). The effectiveness of SkyGP is validated through extensive benchmarks and real-time control experiments demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Streaming Generated Gaussian Process Experts for Online Learning and Control

The application of message-passing Graph Neural Networks has been a breakthrough for important network science problems. However, the competitive performance often relies on using handcrafted structural features as inputs, which increases computational cost and introduces bias into the otherwise purely data-driven network representations. Here, we eliminate the need for handcrafted features by introducing an attention mechanism and utilizing message-iteration profiles, in addition to an effective algorithmic approach to generate a structurally diverse training set of small synthetic networks. Thereby, we build an expressive message-passing framework and use it to efficiently solve the NP-hard problem of Network Dismantling, virtually equivalent to vital node identification, with significant real-world applications. Trained solely on diversified synthetic networks, our proposed model—MIND: Message Iteration Network Dismantler—generalizes to large, unseen real networks with millions of nodes, outperforming state-of-the-art network dismantling methods. Increased efficiency and generalizability of the proposed model can be leveraged beyond dismantling in a range of complex network problems.

Learning Network Dismantling Without Handcrafted Inputs

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising results on complex reasoning tasks but remain susceptible to hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often focus solely on final answers, overlooking inconsistencies between the answer and reasoning process. This limitation reduces their ability to detect hallucinations during inference. Moreover, training-free approaches lack mechanisms for confidence estimation, resulting in an unquantified detection output. In contrast, training-based methods can provide fine-grained assessments but often neglect the self-correction capability of LRMs, where earlier errors may be corrected in subsequent steps, leading to inaccurate hallucination detection. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{ConfFuse}, a unified framework that fuses global and local confidence scores for hallucination detection. A Global Hallucination Detection Model (GHDM) is trained using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to assess hallucinations at the level of entire reasoning chains, yielding global confidence estimates. Simultaneously, a Process Reward Model (PRM) estimates step-wise confidence scores to capture local logical flaws. A weighted fusion strategy combines the global confidence score with the minimum local score to jointly reflect overall reasoning consistency and local soundness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ConfFuse surpasses Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-8B by up to 11.86\% and 5.46\% in F1 score on in-distribution datasets, and achieves average improvements of 4.65\% and 2.80\% on out-of-distribution datasets. These results verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed framework.

Global-Local Confidence Fusion for Hallucination Detection in Mathematical Reasoning Task

Deep learning has demonstrated expert-level performance in melanoma classification, positioning it as a powerful tool in clinical dermatology. However, model opacity and the lack of interpretability remain critical barriers to clinical adoption, as clinicians often struggle to trust the decision-making processes of black-box models. To address this gap, we present a Cross-Modal Explainable Framework (CMEF) that leverages contrastive learning as the core mechanism for achieving interpretability. Specifically, CMEF maps clinical criteria for melanoma diagnosis—namely Asymmetry, Border, and Color (ABC)—into the Vision Transformer embedding space using dual projection heads, thereby aligning clinical semantics with visual features. The aligned representations are subsequently translated into structured textual explanations via natural language generation, creating a transparent link between raw image data and clinical interpretation. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate 92.79% accuracy and an AUC of 0.961, along with significant improvements across multiple interpretability metrics. Qualitative analyses further show that the spatial arrangement of the learned embeddings aligns with clinicians’ application of the ABC rule, effectively bridging the gap between high-performance classification and clinical trust.

Explainable Melanoma Diagnosis with Contrastive Learning and LLM-based Report Generation

Abstract of T-RO publication: "Robots need to predict and
react to human motions to navigate through a crowd without
collisions. Many existing methods decouple prediction from
planning, which does not account for the interaction
between robot and human motions and can lead to the robot
getting stuck. We propose SICNav, a Model Predictive
Control (MPC) method that jointly solves for robot motion
and predicted crowd motion in closed-loop. We model each
human in the crowd to be following an Optimal Reciprocal
Collision Avoidance (ORCA) scheme and embed that model as a
constraint in the robot's local planner, resulting in a
bilevel nonlinear MPC optimization problem. We use a
KKT-reformulation to cast the bilevel problem as a single
level and use a nonlinear solver to optimize. Our MPC
method can influence pedestrian motion while explicitly
satisfying safety constraints in a single-robot multi-human
environment. We analyze the performance of SICNav in two
simulation environments and indoor experiments with a real
robot to demonstrate safe robot motion that can influence
the surrounding humans. We also validate the trajectory
forecasting performance of ORCA on a human trajectory
dataset."

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) Publication: "SICNav:
Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation Using Model
Predictive Control and Bilevel Optimization"

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

EdGCL: Disentangling Social and Cognitive Homophily in Graph-Based Educational Recommender Systems

Similar lecture

W2P: Switching from Weak Supervision to Partial Supervision for Semantic Segmentation