GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Learnable Matrix Profile for Motif Discovery on Multivariate Time Series
Authors: Mingkai Lin; Yinke Wang; Xiaobin Hong; Wenzhong Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multivariate motif discovery aims to identify frequently occurring subsequences within multi-dimensional time series, which is a critical machine learning task with wide applications. However, previous motif discovery algorithms often miss complex multivariate motifs and struggle with high computational costs as data scale and dimensionality grow. We propose a novel learnable multivariate matrix profile method (L-MAP) that captures inter-dimensional dependencies for comprehensive analysis of multivariate time series. The time series is partitioned into subsequences using the Fourier transform in the frequency domain, with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) assigning them to buckets based on distinct patterns. Each subsequence is modeled as a graph for multivariate fusion, where triplet learning is used to capture cross-dimensional relationships and form graph embeddings. Unlike prior methods relying on Euclidean distance modeling, our graph-based approach computes all-pairs similarity in a latent space, which constructs the multivariate matrix profile from distributions formed by embedding clusters. Extensive experiments on multivariate datasets from diverse domains demonstrate that L-MAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motif discovery, offering superior quality, diversity, and scalability efficiency.
Comprehensive Urban Region Representation Learning via Multi-View Joint Learning and Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yingde Lin; Yuanbo Xu; Lu Jiang; Pengyang Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Urban region embedding, which learns dense vector representations for urban zones, plays a foundational role in data-driven urban intelligence. These representations are critical for downstream applications like public safety management
and infrastructure development, requiring nuanced understanding of urban functionality. A core challenge remains effective fusion of multi-view data (e.g., human mobility flows and static regional attributes) into unified zone representations. To this end, we propose MVJC, a Multi-view Joint Learning and Contrastive Learning framework, which employs: (1) Multi-view Joint Learning (MVJL) layer to model intra-view dependencies to extract view-specific features and (2) Multi-view Contrastive Learning (MVCL) layer to perform cross-region aggregation to derive consensus representations while capturing the regional complementarity. We further introduce a structure-aware contrastive loss that mitigates false negatives by aligning representations through region topology instead of instance identity. Extensive experiments on New York City datasets demonstrate MVJC’s superiority: it reduces crime prediction MAE by 9.1% (vs. 66.9 baseline) and improves land use clustering F-measure by 55.6% (vs. 0.45 baseline) over state-of-the-art method, which is attributed to MVJC’s synergy of joint and contrastive learning, yielding representations that are simultaneously predictive and semantically discriminative.
Multifaceted Scenario-Aware Hypergraph Learning for Next POI Recommendation
Authors: Yuxi Lin; Yongkang Li; Jie Xing; Zipei Fan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Among the diverse services provided by Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs), Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in inferring user preferences from historical check-in trajectories. However, existing sequential and graph-based methods frequently neglect significant mobility variations across distinct contextual scenarios (e.g., tourists versus locals). This oversight results in suboptimal performance due to two fundamental limitations: the inability to capture scenario-specific features and the failure to resolve inherent inter-scenario conflicts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Multifaceted Scenario-Aware Hypergraph Learning method (MSAHG), a framework that adopts a scenario-splitting paradigm for next POI recommendation.
Our main contributions are:
(1) Construction of scenario-specific, multi-view disentangled sub-hypergraphs to capture distinct mobility patterns;
(2) A parameter-splitting mechanism to adaptively resolve conflicting optimization directions across scenarios while preserving generalization capability.
Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MSAHG consistently outperforms five state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenarios, confirming its effectiveness in multi-scenario POI recommendation.
RAGAR: Retrieval Augmented Personalized Image Generation Guided by Recommendation
Authors: Run Ling; Wenji Wang; Yuting Liu; Guibing Guo; Haowei Liu; Jian Lu; Quanwei Zhang; Yexing Xu; Shuo Lu; Yun Wang; Yihua Shao; Linying Jiang; Xingwei Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Personalized image generation is crucial for improving the user experience, as it renders reference images into preferred ones according to user visual preferences. Although effective, existing methods face two main issues. First, existing methods treat all items in the user's historical sequence equally when extracting user preferences, overlooking the varying semantic similarities between historical items and the reference item. Disproportionately high weights for low-similarity items distort user visual preferences for the reference item. Second, existing methods heavily rely on consistency between generated and reference images to optimize generation, which leads to underfitting user preferences and hinders personalization. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval Augmented Personalized Image GenerAtion guided by Recommendation (RAGAR). Our approach uses a retrieval mechanism to assign different weights to historical items according to their similarities to the reference item, thereby extracting more refined users' visual preferences for the reference item. Then we introduce a novel rank task based on the multi-modal ranking model to optimize the personalization of the generated images instead of forcing depend on consistency. Extensive experiments and human evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that RAGAR achieves significant improvements in both personalization and semantic metrics compared to five baselines.
UrbanPG: An Efficient Framework with Personalized Context and General Backbone Interaction for Urban Spatio-Temporal Learning
Authors: Aoyu Liu; Yaying Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As urban data expands, existing spatio-temporal models encounter challenges such as high context dependency, poor cross-scenario generalization, and inefficient computational performance. To address these issues, we propose UrbanPG, an efficient and scalable framework for spatio-temporal learning. UrbanPG separates task-specific personalized patterns from general patterns, enabling unified spatio-temporal modeling and efficient knowledge generalization across scenarios. The key innovations of UrbanPG include: the development of a lightweight, context-independent general backbone utilizing linear spatio-temporal attention for scalable cross-scenario deployment; a personalized context prompt mechanism designed to model heterogeneity through spatio-temporal embeddings and random perturbation regularization, interacting with the backbone to enhance pattern differentiation; the proposal of multi spatio-temporal learning paradigms for rapid knowledge transfer and generalization to downstream tasks through fine-tuning personalized context prompts while freezing the backbone. Experimental results demonstrate that UrbanPG achieves state-of-the-art performance in large-scale forecasting, few-shot transfer, and continual learning tasks across eight real-world datasets, showcasing exceptional performance, strong generalization, and significant reductions in computational overhead.
Relative Advantage Debiasing for Watch-Time Prediction in Short-Video Recommendation
Authors: Emily Liu; Kuan Han; Minfeng Zhan; Bocheng Zhao; Guanyu Mu; Yang Song
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Watch time is widely used as a proxy for user satisfaction in video recommendation platforms. However, raw watch times are influenced by confounding factors such as video duration, popularity, and individual user behaviors, potentially distorting preference signals and resulting in biased recommendation models. We propose a novel relative advantage debiasing framework that corrects watch time by comparing it to empirically derived reference distributions conditioned on user and item groups. This approach yields a quantile-based preference signal and introduces a two-stage architecture that explicitly separates distribution estimation from preference learning. Additionally, we present distributional embeddings to efficiently parameterize watch-time quantiles without requiring online sampling or storage of historical data. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and robustness compared to existing baseline methods.
Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization for LLM-based User Simulators in Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Hongyang Liu; Zhu Sun; Tianjun Wei; Yan Wang; Jiajie Zhu; Xinghua Qu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled realistic user simulators for developing and evaluating recommender systems (RSs). However, existing LLM-based simulators for RSs face two major limitations: (1) static and single-step prompt-based inference that leads to inaccurate and incomplete user profile construction; (2) unrealistic and single-round recommendation-feedback interaction pattern that fails to capture real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose DGDPO (Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization), a novel framework that constructs user profile through a dynamic and iterative optimization process to enhance the simulation fidelity.  Specifically, DGDPO incorporates two core modules within each optimization loop: firstly, a specialized LLM-based diagnostic module, calibrated through our novel training strategy, accurately identifies specific defects in the user profile. Subsequently, a generalized LLM-based treatment module analyzes the diagnosed defect and generates targeted suggestions to refine the profile. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM-based user simulators that are limited to single-round interactions, we are the first to integrate DGDPO with sequential recommenders, enabling a bidirectional evolution where user profiles and recommendation strategies adapt to each other over multi-round interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution
Authors: Hua Liu; Yanbin Wei; Fei Xing; Tyler Derr; Haoyu Han; Yu Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Dynamic graphs are common in real‑world systems such as social media, recommender systems, and traffic networks. Existing dynamic graph models for link prediction often fall short in capturing the full complexity of temporal evolution. 
They tend to overlook fine‑grained variations in interaction order, struggle with dependencies that span long time horizons, and provide limited modeling of pair‑specific relational dynamics. To address those challenges, we propose Graph2Video, a video‑inspired framework that views the temporal neighborhood of a target link as a sequence of “graph frames”. By stacking temporally ordered subgraph frames into a “graph video”, Graph2Video leverages the inductive biases of video foundation models to capture both fine-grained local variations and long-range temporal dynamics. It generates a link-level embedding that serves as a lightweight, plug-and-play, link-centric memory unit. This embedding integrates seamlessly into existing dynamic graph encoders, effectively addressing the limitations of prior approaches. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that Graph2Video outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in the link prediction task on most cases. The results highlight that borrowing spatio‑temporal modeling techniques from computer vision provides a principled and effective avenue for advancing dynamic graph learning.
MoToRec: Sparse-Regularized Multimodal Tokenization for Cold-Start Recommender
Authors: Jialin Liu; Zhaorui Zhang; Ray C.C. Cheung
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized recommender systems by effectively modeling complex user-item interactions, yet data sparsity and the item cold-start problem significantly impair performance, particularly for new items with limited or no interaction history. While multimodal content offers a promising solution, existing methods result in suboptimal representations for new items due to noise and entanglement in sparse data. To address this, we transform multimodal recommendation into discrete semantic tokenization. We present Sparse-Regularized Multimodal Tokenization for Cold-Start Recommender Systems (MoToRec), a framework centered on a sparsely-regularized Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoder (RQ-VAE) that generates a compositional semantic code of discrete, interpretable tokens, promoting disentangled representations. MoToRec’s architecture is enhanced by three synergistic components: (1) a sparsely regularized RQ-VAE that promotes disentangled representations, (2) a novel adaptive rarity amplification that promotes prioritized learning for cold-start items, and (3) a hierarchical multi-source graph encoder for robust signal fusion with collaborative signals. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate MoToRec’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both overall and cold-start scenarios. Our work validates that discrete tokenization provides an effective and scalable alternative for mitigating the long-standing cold-start challenge.
Debate over Mixed-knowledge: A Robust Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Authors: Jilong Liu; Pengyang Shao; Wei Qin; Fei Liu; Yonghui Yang; Richang Hong
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to improve factual accuracy by leveraging structured knowledge. However, real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are often incomplete, leading to the problem of Incomplete KGQA (IKGQA). A common solution is to incorporate external data to fill knowledge gaps, but existing methods lack the capacity to adaptively and contextually fuse multiple sources, failing to fully exploit their complementary strengths. To this end, we propose Debate over Mixed-knowledge (DoM), a novel framework that enables dynamic integration of structured and unstructured knowledge for IKGQA. Built upon the Multi-Agent Debate paradigm, DoM assigns specialized agents to perform inference over knowledge graphs and external texts separately, and coordinates their outputs through iterative interaction. It decomposes the input question into sub-questions, retrieves evidence via dual agents (KG and Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG), and employs a judge agent to evaluate and aggregate intermediate answers. This collaboration exploits knowledge complementarity and enhances robustness to KG incompleteness. In addition, existing IKGQA datasets simulate incompleteness by randomly removing triples, failing to capture the irregular and unpredictable nature of real-world knowledge incompleteness. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, Incomplete Knowledge Graph WebQuestions, constructed by leveraging real-world knowledge updates. These updates reflect knowledge beyond the static scope of KGs, yielding a more realistic and challenging benchmark. Through extensive experiments, we show that DoM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
MACRec: A Multi-View Subspace Alignment Framework for Contrastive Sampling Calibration in Recommendation
Authors: Junping Liu; Mingchao Yu; Xinrong Hu; Rui Yan; Wanqing Li; Jie Yang; Yi Guo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has proven effective in mitigating data sparsity and enhancing representation learning for recommendation. Yet, most GCL frameworks indiscriminately treat all non-anchor nodes as negatives during contrastive sampling, often leading to the false negative problem where semantically similar nodes are incorrectly repelled. Previous attempts to mitigate this issue rely on predetermined heuristics or local neighborhood mining, which struggle to reliably identify false negatives. More critically, they often overlook authentic user-item interactions for anchoring sample relationships. As a result, this paper presents MACRec, a Multi-View subspace-Alignment framework designed to Calibrate contrastive sampling in GCLbased Recommendation. MACRec comprises three core components: (1) a Multi-View Affinity (MVA) module that captures consistent semantic relations across multiple augmentations via self-expression modeling; (2) a Cross-Subspace Alignment (CSA) mechanism that leverages authentic useritem behavioral interactions to enforce semantic consistency across user and item subspaces; and (3) a Calibrationbased Contrastive Reweighting (CCR) strategy to dynamically down-weight potential false negatives during the contrastive learning process. Extensive experiments on three realworld benchmarks demonstrate that MACRec consistently improves performance across various augmentation backbones, achieving up to 14.55% relative gains.
Hierarchical Attention Network with Correction for Cross-Domain User Association
Authors: Wenlong Liu; Ze Wang; Chenlong Wu; Yude Bai; Ji Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite the rich spatiotemporal patterns contained in trajectory data from multiple Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) platforms, heterogeneous formats, semantic inconsistencies, and unequal user scales across platforms create substantial barriers to reliable identity mapping. Furthermore, GPS drift and sparse sampling result in degraded data quality and distribution imbalance, which render existing trajectory representation methods inadequate for capturing high-order dependencies and dynamic spatiotemporal evolution patterns in heterogeneous multi-relational graphs.
To this end, we propose HANCUA (Hierarchical Attention Network with Correction for User Association), a novel framework that employs a dual-stage correction mechanism to enhance cross-domain trajectory analysis. The approach constructs hierarchical multi-relational graphs comprising location, trajectory, and correction layers to capture fine-grained mobility patterns, behavioral associations, and inter-platform distribution differences. We design relation-aware multi-head graph attention networks to model complex interactions among heterogeneous node types, which enables comprehensive spatial relationship modeling. A spatiotemporal semantic collaborative learning module integrates temporal information with mobility patterns through interaction-aware attention mechanisms, while an ensemble correction decision module incorporates ensemble learning principles to systematically correct user association biases and address distribution imbalance problems.
Extensive experiments on two real-world LBSN cross-domain datasets reveals that HANCUA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in user identity linking accuracy.
A Scalable and Exact Relaxation for Densest k-Subgraph via Error Bounds
Authors: Ya Liu; Junbin Liu; Wing-Kin Ma; Aritra Konar
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Given an undirected graph and a size parameter k, the Densest k-Subgraph (DkS) problem extracts the subgraph on k vertices with the largest number of induced edges. While DkS is NP--hard and difficult to approximate, penalty-based continuous relaxations of the problem have recently enjoyed practical success for real-world instances of DkS. In this work, we propose a scalable and exact continuous penalization approach for DkS using the error bound principle, which enables the design of suitable penalty functions. Notably, we develop new theoretical guarantees ensuring that both the global and local optima of the penalized problem match those of the original problem. The proposed penalized reformulation enables the use of first-order continuous optimization methods. In particular, we develop a non-convex proximal gradient algorithm, where the non-convex proximal operator can be computed in closed form, resulting in low per-iteration complexity. We also provide convergence analysis of the algorithm. Experiments on large-scale instances of the DkS problem and one of its variants, the Densest (k1, k2) Bipartite Subgraph (Dk1k2BS) problem, demonstrate that our method achieves a favorable balance between computation cost and solution quality.
MIGDiff: Multi-attributes Imputations for Attribute-missing Graphs via Graph Denoising Diffusion Model
Authors: Ye Liu; Yang Chen; Hongmin Cai
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The missing of graph attributes poses a significant challenge in graph representation learning. Some existing graph attribute completion methods adopt the shared-space hypothesis or employ end-to-end frameworks to perform single-attribute imputation. However, these models can only generate one single attribute with a few specific patterns that either adhere to prior knowledge or are optimal for downstream tasks, making it difficult to capture the full range of variations in the target attribute distribution. This limitation negatively impacts the model's generalizability and efficiency.
Therefore, to address this issue, we proposed a new method based on a graph denoising diffusion model, called Multi-attribute Imputation Graph Denoising Diffusion Model (MIGDiff), which can generate multiple high-quality attributes. Specifically, it employs a Dual-source Auto-encoder on existing attributes and graph topology to extract reliable knowledge, which serves as a condition for training the diffusion module.
Within diffusion, noise is added to the structural embeddings of nodes without attributes in the forward process. In the reverse process, a Structure-aware Denoising Network is devised to integrate feature and structural information via an attention mechanism and to perform neighbor-guided refinement based on graph connectivity, thereby enhancing denoising and accurately recovering missing attributes while effectively maintaining structural consistency and distributional fidelity.
During generation, multiple initial values are sampled to produce diverse attribute imputations, avoiding focusing on a few easy-to-learn patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets highlight the state-of-the-art performance of MIGDiff in both attribute imputation and node classification tasks.
SEFEL: A Simple Yet Effective Framework for Fast Event Linking
Authors: Yinan Liu; Ziyang Zhang; Bin Wang; Xiaochun Yang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Event linking aims to associate event mentions in text with their corresponding entries in a knowledge base (KB). This task can help text understanding to benefit downstream tasks (e.g., question answering) and expand the KB through new event knowledge mentioned in the text. Existing event linking approaches usually adopt a retrieve-and-rank framework, which suffers from high computational costs and relies on hand-crafted rules, thereby limiting generalization. Additionally, it is found that some entity linking methods can be used to solve this task directly. However, they also perform not well. In this paper, we propose SEFEL, an end-to-end, argument-aware event representation-based event linking framework to unify the modeling of both in-KB and out-of-KB scenarios. To further enhance the linking performance, we propose a contrastive learning module to refine the learned embeddings of events and event mentions. Experimental results demonstrate that SEFEL improves accuracy by at least 3.59 (in-KB) and 21.5 (out-of-KB) compared with baselines, while its inference speed is more than 38 times faster than baselines, showcasing its accuracy and efficiency.