Singapore

The empathetic dialogue systems aim to recognize user emotions and generate appropriate empathetic responses. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on dialogue history, contextual descriptions, and emotion category labels, failing to model the causal relationship between emotions and their underlying triggers. This limitation leads to generated responses that lack grounding, exhibit weak relevance, and suffer from poor interpretability in emotional expression. To address this, we propose MvP-ECR, a multi-perspective emotion cause reasoning framework that explicitly constructs emotion-cause structures to help models focus on the core emotional drivers. Additionally, we introduce an emotion-cause consistency evaluation metric to quantitatively assess a model’s ability to identify causal relationships. Experiments across multiple large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that the MvP-ECR framework can serve as a plug-and-play tool to help the model correctly infer emotions and causes in empathetic conversations, and provide more immersive responses for empathetic responses. All code and data will be publicly released to promote the development of empathy dialogue research.

AAAI 2026

MvP-ECR: Multi-Perspective Emotion-Cause Reasoning for Empathetic Dialogue

nlp: sentiment analysis

and argument mining

stylistic analysis

cms: affective computing

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

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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.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific domains. While they can produce reasoning-like content via methods such as chain-of-thought prompting, these outputs are typically unstructured and informal, obscuring whether models truly understand the fundamental reasoning paradigms that underpin scientific inference. To address this, we introduce a novel task named Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction (ARCHE), in which models must decompose complex reasoning arguments into combinations of standard reasoning paradigms in the form of a Reasoning Logic Tree (RLT). In an RLT, all reasoning steps are explicitly categorized as one of three variants of Peirce’s fundamental inference modes: deduction, induction, or abduction.
To facilitate this task, we release ARCHE Bench, a new benchmark derived from 70 Nature Communications articles, including more than 1,900 references and 38,000 viewpoints. We propose two logic-aware evaluation metrics: Entity Coverage (EC) for content completeness and Reasoning Edge Accuracy (REA) for step-by-step logical validity. Evaluations on 10 leading LLMs on ARCHE Bench reveal that models exhibit a trade-off between REA and EC, and none are yet able to extract a complete and standard reasoning chain. These findings highlight a substantial gap between the abilities of current reasoning models and the rigor required for scientific argumentation.

ARCHE: A Novel Task to Evaluate LLMs on Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction

Recent generative models have significantly advanced speech restoration tasks, yet their training objectives often misalign with human perceptual preferences, resulting in suboptimal quality. While post-training alignment has proven effective in other generative domains like text and image generation, its application to generative speech restoration remains largely under-explored. This work investigates the challenges of applying preference-based post-training to this task, focusing on how to define a robust preference signal and curate high-quality data to avoid reward hacking. To address these challenges, we propose a **multi-metric preference alignment** strategy. We construct a new dataset, ***GenSR-Pref***, comprising 80K preference pairs, where each chosen sample is unanimously favored by a complementary suite of metrics covering perceptual quality, signal fidelity, content consistency, and timbre preservation. This principled approach ensures a holistic preference signal. Applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with our dataset, we observe consistent and significant performance gains across three diverse generative paradigms: autoregressive models (AR), masked generative models (MGM), and flow-matching models (FM) on various restoration benchmarks, in both objective and subjective evaluations. Ablation studies confirm the superiority of our multi-metric strategy over single-metric approaches in mitigating reward hacking. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our aligned models can serve as powerful ''data annotators'', generating high-quality pseudo-labels to serve as a supervision signal for traditional discriminative models in data-scarce scenarios like singing voice restoration.

Multi-Metric Preference Alignment for Generative Speech Restoration

We introduce PKR-QA ($\textit{Procedural Knowledge Reasoning Question Answering}$), a new benchmark for question answering over procedural tasks that require structured reasoning. PKR-QA is constructed semi-automatically using a $\textit{procedural knowledge graph}$ (PKG), which encodes task-specific knowledge across diverse domains. The PKG is built by curating and linking information from the COIN instructional video dataset and the ontology, enriched with commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet and structured outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs), followed by manual verification. To generate question-answer pairs, we design graph traversal templates where each template is applied systematically over PKG. To enable interpretable reasoning, we propose a neurosymbolic approach called $\textit{Knowledge Module Learning}$ (KML), which learns procedural relations via neural modules and composes them for structured reasoning with LLMs. Experiments demonstrate that this paradigm improves reasoning performance on PKR-QA and enables step-by-step reasoning traces that facilitate interpretability. Code and dataset will be released upon publication.

PKR-QA: A Benchmark for Procedural Knowledge Reasoning with Knowledge Module Learning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown significant progress in test-time scaling through chain-of-thought prompting. 
Current approaches like search-o1 integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into multi-step reasoning processes but rely on a single, linear reasoning path while incorporating unstructured textual information in a flat, context-agnostic manner. As a result, these approaches can lead to error accumulation throughout the reasoning chain, which significantly limits its effectiveness in medical question-answering (QA) tasks where both accuracy and traceability are critical requirements.
To address these challenges, we propose MIRAGE (Multi-path Inference with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Exploration), a novel test-time scalable reasoning framework that performs dynamic multi-path inference over structured medical knowledge graphs. Specifically, MIRAGE 1) decomposes complex queries into entity-grounded sub-questions, 2) executes parallel inference paths, 3) retrieves evidence adaptively via neighbor expansion and multi-hop traversal, and 4) integrates answers using cross-path verification to resolve contradictions. 
Experiments on three medical QA benchmarks (GenMedGPT-5k, CMCQA, and ExplainCPE) show that MIRAGE consistently outperforms GPT-4o, Tree-of-Thought variants, and other retrieval-augmented baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, MIRAGE improves interpretability by generating explicit reasoning chains that trace each factual claim to concrete paths within the knowledge graph, making it especially suitable for complex medical reasoning scenarios.

MIRAGE: Scaling Test-Time Inference with Parallel Graph-Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Chains

People control their bodies to establish contact with the environment. To comprehensively understand actions across diverse visual contexts, it is essential to simultaneously consider **what** action is occurring and **where** it is happening. Current methodologies, however, often inadequately capture this duality, typically failing to jointly model both action semantics and their spatial contextualization within scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel vision task that simultaneously predicts high-level action semantics and fine-grained body-part contact regions. Our proposed framework, PaIR-Net, comprises three key components: the Contact Prior Aware Module (CPAM) for identifying contact-relevant body parts, the Prior-Guided Concat Segmenter (PGCS) for pixel-wise contact segmentation, and the Interaction Inference Module (IIM) responsible for integrating global interaction relationships. To facilitate this task, we present PaIR (Part-aware Interaction Representation), a comprehensive dataset containing 13,979 images that encompass 654 actions, 80 object categories, and 17 body parts. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that PaIR-Net significantly outperforms baseline approaches, while ablation studies confirm the efficacy of each architectural component. The code and dataset will be released upon publication.

What-Meets-Where: Unified Learning of Action and Contact Localization in Images

Outcome-based reinforcement learning has made notable advances in training language models (LMs) for reasoning. However, without explicit incentives and controls, this paradigm has limitations and instability in eliciting high-quality reasoning trajectories with diverse actions—particularly for models whose pretraining lacked extensive reasoning data. To this end, we introduce MetaAct-RL, a new RL framework that frames LMs’ thought process as sequential decision making over meta-actions. In this framework, the model chooses and executes a high-level action at each step—such as forward reasoning, critique, or refinement—to gradually reach the correct answer. To encourage deeper exploration, richer action diversity, and to improve sampling efficiency in the RL optimization process, Meta-Act-RL incorporates appropriate length-based reward and regularization, and a key-state restart mechanism. Extensive experiments across six benchmark tasks show that Meta-Act-RL improves reasoning performance by $7.99$ on Llama3.2-1B and $7.17$ on Llama3.1-8B relative to vanilla RL method. Moreover, on the challenging AIME-2024, our method outperforms the vanilla RL by $7.5$ with Qwen2.5-1.5B.

MetaAct-RL: Training Language Models for Reasoning Through Meta-Action-Based Reinforcement Learning

Real-world heterogeneous data is commonly modeled as heterogeneous information networks (HINs). Building upon advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), existing research has significantly progressed in semi-supervised and self-supervised paradigms for heterogeneous GNNs (HGNNs). However, these methods overlook inherent structural deficiencies in raw heterogeneous graphs. We identifies unique structural noise in HINs: missing potential critical edges and multi-relational semantically redundant edges, which force existing HGNNs to learn suboptimal representations on fixed topologies. Crucially, prior limited studies address only partial noise while remaining architecturally entrenched and tightly coupled with specific models. To break this bottleneck, we propose a plug-and-play Heterogeneous graph Structure ADaPter (HSADP) that simultaneously resolves task/model decoupling challenges while accounting for HIN-specific structural properties with with two core components: a dynamic homogeneous subgraph enhancer recovering latent topology across semantic views and a learnable heterogeneous edge discriminator dynamically suppressing redundant edges while collaboratively optimizing semantic graphs. Extensive experiments across multi-domain datasets demonstrate our method’s effectiveness and compatibility. The adapter significantly boosts node classification accuracy for multiple SOTA approaches and surpasses specially designed heterogeneous graph structure learning models.

Structure-Enhanced Adapter for Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of tasks. However, their reasoning capabilities, particularly in complex domains like mathematics, remain a significant challenge. Value-based process verifiers, which estimate the probability of a partial reasoning chain leading to a correct solution, are a promising approach for improving reasoning. Nevertheless, their effectiveness is often hindered by estimation error in their training annotations, a consequence of the limited number of Monte Carlo (MC) samples feasible due to the high cost of LLM inference. In this paper, we identify that the estimation error primarily arises from high variance rather than bias, and the MC estimator is a Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator (MVUE). To address the problem, we propose the \textsc{Com}pound \textsc{M}onte \textsc{C}arlo \textsc{S}ampling (ComMCS) method, which constructs an unbiased estimator by linearly combining the MC estimators from the current and subsequent steps. Theoretically, we show that our method leads to a predictable reduction in variance, while maintaining an unbiased estimation without additional LLM inference cost. We also perform empirical experiments on the MATH-500 and GSM8K benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, ComMCS outperforms regression-based optimization method by 2.8 points, the non-variance-reduced baseline by 2.2 points on MATH-500 on Best-of-32 sampling experiment.

Improving Value-based Process Verifier via Low-Cost Variance Reduction

The proliferation of multimodal misinformation poses growing threats to public discourse and societal trust. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have enabled recent progress in multimodal misinformation detection (MMD), the rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools introduces a new challenge: GenAI-driven news diversity, characterized by highly varied and complex content. We show that this diversity induces multi-level drift, comprising (1) model-level misperception drift, where stylistic variations disrupt a model’s internal reasoning, and (2) evidence-level drift, where expression diversity degrades the quality or relevance of retrieved external evidence. These drifts significantly degrade the robustness of current LVLM-based MMD systems. To systematically study this problem, we introduce DriftBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 16,000 news instances across six categories of diversification. We design three evaluation tasks: (1) robustness of truth verification under multi-level drift; (2) susceptibility to adversarial evidence contamination generated by GenAI; and (3) analysis of reasoning consistency across diverse inputs. Experiments with six state-of-the-art LVLM-based detectors show substantial performance drops (average F1 $\downarrow$ 14.8\%) and increasingly unstable reasoning traces, with even more severe failures under adversarial evidence injection. Our findings uncover fundamental vulnerabilities in existing MMD systems and suggest an urgent need for more resilient approaches in the GenAI era.

Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection

Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in probabilistic AI. However, verifying if a sampler program indeed samples from the claimed distribution is a notoriously hard problem. Provably correct testers like Barbarik,Teq,Flash, Cubeprobe for testing of different kinds of samplers were proposed only in the last few years. All these testers focus on the worst-case efficiency, and do not support verification of samplers over infinite domains, a case occurring frequently in Astronomy, Finance, Network Security etc.

In this work, we design the first tester of samplers with instance-dependent efficiency, allowing us to test samplers over natural numbers. Our tests are developed via a novel distance estimation algorithm between an unknown and a known probability distribution using an 'interval conditioning' framework. The core technical contribution is a new connection with probability mass estimation of a continuous distribution. The practical gains are also substantial—our experiments establish up to 1000× speedup over state-of-the-art testers.

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