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Federated learning (FL) is known to be susceptible to model poisoning attacks in which malicious clients hamper the accuracy of the global model by sending manipulated model updates to the central server during the FL training process.  Existing defenses mainly focus on Byzantine-robust FL aggregations, and largely ignore the impact of the underlying deep neural network (DNN) that is used to FL training.  Inspired by recent findings on critical learning periods (CLP) in DNNs, where small gradient errors have irrecoverable impact on the final model accuracy, we propose a new defense, called \textit{a CLP-aware defense against poisoning of FL} (DeFL).  The key idea of DeFL is to measure fine-grained differences between DNN model updates via an easy-to-compute federated gradient norm vector (FGNV) metric.  Using FGNV, DeFL simultaneously detects malicious clients and identifies CLP, which in turn is leveraged to guide the adaptive removal of detected malicious clients from aggregation.  As a result, DeFL not only mitigates model poisoning attacks on the global model but also is robust to detection errors.  Our extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DeFL produces significant performance gain over conventional defenses against state-of-the-art model poisoning attacks.

AAAI 2023

DeFL: Defending Against Model Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning via Critical Learning Periods Awareness

defl

model poisoning

critical learning periods

defense

federated learning

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.

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AAAI 2026

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.

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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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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.

Modern recommender systems are increasingly expected to provide informative explanations that enable users to understand the reason for particular recommendations. However, previous methods struggle to interpret the input 
IDs of user--item pairs in real-world datasets, failing to extract adequate characteristics for controllable generation. To address this issue, we propose disentangled conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs) for explainable recommendation, which leverage disentangled latent preference factors and guide the explanation generation with the refined condition of CVAEs via a self-regularization contrastive learning loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-quality explanations and achieves new state-of-the-art results in diverse domains.

Disentangled CVAEs with Contrastive Learning for Explainable Recommendation

Quantum computers are regarded as a technology that will break Moore’s law. Recently, research on quantum deep learning, which processes data with logarithm complexity through a quantum neural network (QNN), is attracting attention. However, the full potential of QNNs has not been discovered yet. For this, we focus on the meta-characteristic of QNN that the quantum state is a knowledge base, and the measurement basis is a kernel to output. Moreover, one of the quantum measurement properties is easy initialization and transformation while requiring low memory and computation. Motivated by these features, this paper aims to investigate the full potential of QNNs in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and continual learning, named quantum multi-agent meta reinforcement learning (QMAMRL). To realize QMAMRL, we propose meta-QNN angle training, local QNN pole training, and pole initialization. In meta-QNN angle training, artificial noises are added on a measurement basis (i.e., pole) to improve knowledge. Then, local QNN pole training realizes the cooperation of multiple agents. Finally, pole initialization helps QNNs to achieve an adaptation to varying environments. Via extensive experiments and convergence analysis, we corroborate that our proposed QMAMRL framework has new properties that the previous algorithms have not.

Quantum Multi-Agent Meta Reinforcement Learning

Endowing dialogue agents with personas is the key to delivering more human-like conversations. However, existing persona-grounded dialogue systems still lack informative details of human conversations and tend to reply with inconsistent and generic responses.  
One of the main underlying causes is that pre-defined persona sentences are generally short and merely superficial descriptions of personal attributes, making appropriate persona selection and understanding non-trivial.
Another challenge is that it is crucial to consider the context and the conversation flow to dynamically determine when to invoke which kinds of persona signals.
To address these problems, we propose a disentangled-attention based pre-training architecture, which incorporates persona-aware prompt learning to bridge the connection between the selected persona and response generation. Our model first exploits the conversation flow to select context-relevant personas, and subsequently enriches the superficial persona descriptions with extra personality traits through persona-aware prompting. Finally, the decoder leverages a disentangled-attention mechanism to flexibly control the reliance on personas and dialogue contexts, and incorporates A*-like keyword-based heuristic estimates for controllable generation. Extensive experiments show that our approach can outperform strong baselines and deliver more consistent and engaging responses on the PERSONA-CHAT dataset.

A Disentangled-Attention Based Framework with Persona-Aware Prompt Learning for Dialogue Generation

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is an extreme case of transfer learning that aims to recognize samples (e.g., images) of unseen classes relying on a train-set covering only seen classes and a set of auxiliary knowledge (e.g., semantic descriptors). Existing methods usually resort to constructing a visual-to-semantics mapping based on features extracted from each whole sample. However, since the visual and semantic spaces are inherently independent and may exist in different manifolds, these methods may easily suffer from the domain bias problem due to the knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes. Unlike existing works, this paper investigates the fine-grained ZSL from a novel perspective of sample-level graph. Specifically, we decompose an input into several fine-grained elements and construct a graph structure per sample to measure and utilize element-granularity relations within each sample. Taking advantage of recently developed graph neural networks (GNNs), we formulate the ZSL problem to a graph-to-semantics mapping task, which can better exploit element-semantics correlation and local sub-structural information in samples. Experimental results on the widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can mitigate the domain bias problem and achieve competitive performance against other representative methods.

Graph Knows Unknowns: Reformulate Zero-shot Learning as Sample-level Graph Recognition

Continual graph learning routinely finds its role in a variety of real-world applications where the graph data with different tasks come sequentially. Despite the success of prior works, it still faces great challenges. On the one hand, existing methods work with the zero-curvature Euclidean space, and largely ignore the fact that curvature varies over the com- ing graph sequence. On the other hand, continual learners in the literature rely on abundant labels, but labeling graph in practice is particularly hard especially for the continuously emerging graphs on-the-fly. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose to explore a challenging yet practical problem, the self-supervised continual graph learning in adaptive Riemannian spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised Riemannian Graph Continual Learner (RieGrace). In RieGrace, we first design an Adaptive Riemannian GCN (AdaRGCN), a unified GCN coupled with a neural curvature adapter, so that Riemannian space is shaped by the learnt curvature adaptive to each graph. Then, we present a Label-free Lorentz Distillation approach, in which we create teacher-student AdaRGCN for the graph sequence. The student successively performs intra-distillation from itself and inter-distillation from the teacher so as to consolidate knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. In particular, we propose a theoretically grounded Generalized Lorentz Projection for the contrastive distillation in Riemannian space. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets show the superiority of RieGrace, and additionally, we investigate on how curvature changes over the graph sequence. 

Self-Supervised Continual Graph Learning in Adaptive Riemannian Spaces

With the development of the online education system, personalized education recommendation has played an essential role. In this paper, we focus on developing path recommendation systems that aim to generating and recommending an entire learning path to the given user in each session. Noticing that existing approaches fail to consider the correlations of concepts in the path, we propose a novel framework named Set-to-Sequence Ranking-based Concept-aware Learning Path Recommendation (SRC), which formulates the recommendation task under a set-to-sequence paradigm. Specifically, we first design a concept-aware encoder module which can capture the correlations among the input learning concepts. The outputs are then fed into a decoder module that sequentially generates a path through an attention mechanism that handles correlations between the learning and target concepts. Our recommendation policy is optimized by policy gradient. In addition, we also introduce an auxiliary module based on knowledge tracing to enhance the model’s stability by evaluating students’ learning effects on learning concepts. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world public datasets and one industrial dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of SRC. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/recommend/SRC.

Set-to-Sequence Ranking-based Concept-aware Learning Path Recommendation

Safe reinforcement learning considers practical scenarios that maximize the return while satisfying safety constraints. Current algorithms, which suffer from training oscillations or approximation errors, still struggle to update the policy efficiently with precise constraint satisfaction. In this article, we propose Augmented Proximal Policy Optimization (APPO), which augments the Lagrangian function of the primal constrained problem via attaching a quadratic deviation term. The constructed multiplier-penalty function dampens cost oscillation for stable convergence while being equivalent to the primal constrained problem to precisely control safety costs. APPO alternately updates the policy and the Lagrangian multiplier via solving the constructed augmented primal-dual problem, which can be easily implemented by any first-order optimizer. We apply our APPO methods in diverse safety-constrained tasks, setting a new state of the art compared with a comprehensive list of safe RL baselines. Extensive experiments verify the merits of our method in easy implementation, stable convergence, and precise cost control.

Augmented Proximal Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in large pre-trained models showed promising results in few-shot learning. However, their generalization ability on two-dimensional Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data, i.e., correlation shift and diversity shift, has not been thoroughly investigated. Researches have shown that even with a significant amount of training data, few methods can achieve better performance than the standard empirical risk minimization method (ERM) in OoD generalization. This few-shot OoD generalization dilemma emerges as a challenging direction in deep neural network generalization research, where the performance suffers from overfitting on few-shot examples and OoD generalization errors. In this paper, leveraging a broader supervision source, we explore a novel Bayesian cross-modal image-text alignment learning method (Bayes-CAL) to address this issue. Specifically, the model is designed as only text representations are fine-tuned via a Bayesian modeling approach with gradient orthogonalization loss and invariant risk minimization (IRM) loss. The Bayesian approach is essentially introduced to avoid overfitting the base classes observed during training and improve generalization to broader unseen classes. The dedicated loss is introduced to achieve better image-text alignment by disentangling the causal and non-casual parts of image features. Numerical experiments demonstrate that Bayes-CAL achieved state-of-the-art OoD generalization performances on two-dimensional distribution shifts. Moreover, compared with CLIP-like models, Bayes-CAL yields more stable generalization performances on unseen classes.

Bayesian Cross-modal Alignment Learning for Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Accurate estimation of output quantiles is crucial in many use cases where it is desired to model the range of possibility. Modeling target distribution at arbitrary quantile levels and at arbitrary input attribute levels is important to offer a comprehensive picture of the data and requires the quantile function to be expressive enough. The quantile function describing the target distribution using quantile levels is critical for quantile regression. Despite various parametric forms for the distributions (that quantile function specifies) can be adopted, an everlasting problem is selecting the most appropriate one that can properly approximate the data distributions. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach Neural Spline Search (NSS) to represent the observed data distribution without relying on the assumptions for the parametric form. NSS offers a flexible and expressive approach for the data distribution by transforming the inputs with a series of monotonic spline regressions guided by symbolic operators. We demonstrate that NSS  outperforms previous methods on synthetic, real-world regression and time-series

Neural Spline Search for Quantile Probabilistic Modeling

Data augmentation is widely used in text classification, especially in the low-resource regime where a few examples for each class are available during training. Despite the success, generating data augmentations as hard positive examples that may increase their effectiveness is under-explored. This paper proposes an Adversarial Word Dilution (AWD) method that can generate hard positive examples as text data augmentations to train the low-resource text classification model efficiently. Our idea of augmenting the text data is to dilute the embedding of strong positive words by weighted mixing with unknown-word embedding, making the augmented inputs hard to be recognized as positive by the classification model. We adversarially learn the dilution weights through a constrained min-max optimization process with the guidance of the labels. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets show that AWD can generate more effective data augmentations and outperform the state-of-the-art text data augmentation methods. The additional analysis demonstrates that the data augmentations generated by AWD are interpretable and can flexibly extend to new examples without further training. 

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