United States

The microvascular invasion (MVI) is a major prognostic factor in hepatocellular carcinoma, which is one of the malignant tumors with the highest mortality rate. The diagnosis of MVI needs discovering the vessels that contain hepatocellular carcinoma cells and counting their number in each vessel, which depends heavily on experiences of the doctor, is largely subjective and  time-consuming. However, there is no algorithm as yet tailored for the MVI detection from  pathological images. This paper collects the first pathological liver image dataset containing $522$ whole slide images with labels of vessels, MVI, and hepatocellular carcinoma grades. The first and essential step for the automatic diagnosis of MVI is the accurate segmentation of vessels. The unique characteristics of pathological liver images, such as super-large size, multi-scale vessel, and blurred vessel edges, make the accurate vessel segmentation challenging. Based on the collected dataset, we propose an Edge-competing Vessel Segmentation Network (EVS-Net), which contains a segmentation network and two edge segmentation discriminators. The segmentation network, combined with an edge-aware self-supervision mechanism, is devised to conduct vessel segmentation with limited labeled patches. Meanwhile, two discriminators are introduced to distinguish whether the segmented vessel and background contain residual features in an adversarial manner. In the training stage, two discriminators are devised to compete for the predicted  position of edges. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that, with only limited labeled patches, EVS-Net achieves a close performance of fully supervised methods, which provides a convenient tool for the pathological liver vessel segmentation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/wang97zh/EVS-Net.

AAAI 2021

Edge-Competing Pathological Liver Vessel Segmentation with Limited Labels

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.

technical paper

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. 

We present a novel approach to cognitive planning, i.e., an agent's planning aimed at changing the cognitive attitudes of another agent including her beliefs and intentions. We encode the cognitive planning problem in an epistemic logic with a semantics exploiting belief bases. We study a NP-fragment of the logic whose satisfiability problem is reduced to SAT. We provide complexity results for the cognitive planning problem. Moreover, we illustrate its potential for applications in human-machine interaction in which an artificial agent is expected to interact with a human agent through dialogue and to persuade the human to behave in a certain way.

A Simple Framework for Cognitive Planning

Symbolic search has proven to be a useful approach to optimal classical planning. In Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, however, there is little work on optimal planning. One reason for this is that in HTN planning, most algorithms are based on heuristic search, and admissible heuristics have to incorporate the structure of the task network in order to be informative. In this paper, we present a novel approach to optimal (totally-ordered) HTN planning, which is based on symbolic search. An empirical analysis shows that our symbolic approach outperforms the current state of the art for optimal totally-ordered HTN planning.

Symbolic Search for Optimal Total-Order HTN Planning

Massively multilingual pre-trained language models, such as mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have received significant attention in the recent NLP literature for their excellent capability towards crosslingual zero-shot transfer of NLP tasks. This is especially promising because a large number of languages have no or very little labeled data for supervised learning. Moreover, a substantially improved performance on low resource languages without any significant degradation of accuracy for high resource languages lead us to believe that these models will help attain a fairer distribution of language technologies despite the prevalent unfair and extremely skewed distribution of resources across the worldâ€™s languages.

Nevertheless, these models, and the experimental approaches adopted by the researchers to arrive at those, have been criticised by some for lacking a nuanced and thorough comparison of benefits across languages and tasks. A related and important question that has received little attention is how to choose from a set of models, when no single model significantly outperforms the others on all tasks and languages. As we discuss in this paper, this is often the case, and the choices are usually made without a clear articulation of reasons or underlying fairness assumptions. In this work, we scrutinize the choices made in previous work, and propose a few different strategies for fair and efficient model selection based on the principles of fairness in economics and social choice theory. In particular, we emphasize Rawlsian fairness, which provides an appropriate framework for making fair (with respect to languages, or tasks, or both) choices while selecting multilingual pre-trained language models for a practical or scientific set-up.

How Linguistically Fair Are Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models?

We initiate a comprehensive experimental study of objective-based hierarchical clustering methods on massive datasets consisting of deep embedding vectors from computer vision and NLP applications. This includes a large variety of image embedding (ImageNet, ImageNetV2, NaBirds), word embedding (Twitter, Wikipedia), and sentence embedding (SST-2) vectors from several popular recent models (e.g. ResNet, ResNext, Inception V3, SBERT). Our study includes datasets with up to 4.5 million data points with embedding dimensions up to 2048.

In order to address the challenge of scaling up hierarchical clustering to such large datasets we propose a new practical hierarchical clustering algorithm B++&C. It gives a 5%/20% improvement on average for the popular Moseley-Wang (MW)/ Cohen-Addad et al. (CKMM) objectives (normalized) compared to a wide range of classic methods and recent heuristics. We also introduce a theoretical algorithm B2SAT&C which achieves a 0.74-approximation for the CKMM objective in polynomial time. This is the first substantial improvement over the trivial 2/3-approximation achieved by a random binary tree. Prior to this work, the best poly-time approximation of â‰ˆ2/3 + 0.0004 was due to Charikar et al. (SODAâ€™19)

Objective-Based Hierarchical Clustering of Deep Embedding Vectors

Neural dialogue models suffer from low-quality responses when interacted in practice, demonstrating difficulty in generalization beyond training data. Recently, knowledge distillation has been used to successfully regularize the student by transferring knowledge from the teacher. However, the teacher and the student are trained on the same dataset and tend to learn similar feature representations, whereas the most general knowledge should be found through differences. The finding of general knowledge is further hindered by the unidirectional distillation, as the student should obey the teacher and may discard some knowledge that is truly general but refuted by the teacher. To this end, we propose a novel training framework, where the learning of general knowledge is more in line with the idea of reaching consensus, i.e., finding common knowledge that is beneficial to different yet all datasets through diversified learning partners. Concretely, the training task is divided into a group of subtasks with the same number of students. Each student assigned to one subtask not only is optimized on the allocated subtask but also imitates multi-view feature representation aggregated from other students (i.e., student peers), which induces students to capture common knowledge among different subtasks and alleviates the over-fitting of students on the allocated subtasks. To further enhance generalization, we extend the unidirectional distillation to the bidirectional distillation that encourages the student and its student peers to co-evolve by exchanging complementary knowledge with each other. Empirical results and analysis demonstrate that our training framework effectively improves the model generalization without sacrificing training efficiency.

Multi-View Feature Representation for Dialogue Generation with Bidirectional Distillation

Characterizing the underlying mechanism of graph topological evolution from a source graph to a target graph has attracted fast increasing attention in the deep graph learning domain. However, it is very challenging to build expressive and efficient models that can handle global and local evolution patterns between source and target graphs. On the other hand, graph topological evolution has been investigated in the graph signal processing domain historically, but it involves intensive labors to manually determine suitable prescribed spectral models and prohibitive difficulty to fit their potential combinations and compositions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the deep Graph Spectral Evolution Network (GSEN) for modeling the graph topology evolution problem by the composition of newly-developed generalized graph kernels. GSEN can effectively fit a wide range of existing graph kernels and their combinations and compositions with the theoretical guarantee and experimental verification. GSEN has outstanding efficiency in terms of time complexity (O(n)) and parameter complexity (O(1)), where n is the number of nodes of the graph. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate outstanding performance.

Deep Graph Spectral Evolution Networks for Graph Topological Evolution

The standard feedback model of reinforcement learning requires revealing the reward of every visited state-action pair. However, in practice, it is often the case that such frequent feedback is not available. In this work, we take a first step towards relaxing this assumption and require a weaker form of feedback, which we refer to as \emph{trajectory feedback}. Instead of observing the reward obtained after every action, we assume we only receive a score that represents the quality of the whole trajectory observed by the agent, namely, the sum of all rewards obtained over this trajectory. We extend reinforcement learning algorithms to this setting, based on least-squares estimation of the unknown reward, for both the known and unknown transition model cases, and study the performance of these algorithms by analyzing their regret. For cases where the transition model is unknown, we offer a hybrid optimistic-Thompson Sampling approach that results in a tractable algorithm.

Reinforcement Learning with Trajectory Feedback

We present a framework called Acquired Deep Impressions (ADI) which continuously learns knowledge of objects as ``impressions'' for compositional scene understanding. In this framework, the model first acquires knowledge from scene images containing a single object in a supervised manner, and then continues to learn from novel multi-object scene images which may contain objects that have not been seen before without any further supervision, under the guidance of the learned knowledge as humans do. By memorizing impressions of objects into parameters of neural networks and applying the generative replay strategy, the learned knowledge can be reused to generate images with pseudo-annotations and in turn assist the learning of novel scenes. The proposed ADI framework focuses on the acquisition and utilization of knowledge, and is complementary to existing deep generative models proposed for compositional scene representation. We adapt a base model to make it fall within the ADI framework and conduct experiments on two types of datasets. Empirical results suggest that the proposed framework is able to effectively utilize the acquired impressions and improve the scene decomposition performance.

Knowledge-Guided Object Discovery with Acquired Deep Impressions

The task of multi-turn text-to-SQL semantic parsing aims to translate natural language utterances in an interaction into SQL queries in order to answer them using a database which normally contains multiple table schemas. Previous studies on this task usually utilized contextual information to enrich utterance representations and to further influence the decoding process. While they ignored to describe and track the interaction states which are determined by history SQL queries and are related with the intent of current utterance. In this paper, two kinds of interaction states are defined based on schema items and SQL keywords separately. A relational graph neural network and a non-linear layer are designed to update the representations of these two states respectively. The dynamic schema-state and SQL-state representations are then utilized to decode the SQL query corresponding to current utterance. Experimental results on the challenging CoSQL dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves better performance than other published methods on the task leaderboard.

Tracking interaction States for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Visual storytelling is a task of generating relevant and interesting stories for given image sequences. In this work we aim at increasing the diversity of the generated stories while preserving the informative content from the images. We propose to foster the diversity and informativeness of a generated story by using a concept selection module that suggests a set of concept candidates. Then, we utilize a large scale pre-trained model to convert concepts and images into full stories. To enrich the candidate concepts, a commonsense knowledge graph is created for each image sequence from which the concept candidates are proposed. To obtain appropriate concepts from the graph, we propose two novel modules that consider the correlation among candidate concepts and the image-concept correlation. Extensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that our model can produce reasonable concepts. This enables our model to outperform the previous models by a large margin on the diversity and informativeness of the story, while retaining the relevance of the story to the image sequence.

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