GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
EMAformer: Enhancing Transformer Through Embedding Armor for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Zhiwei Zhang; Xinyi Du; Xuanchi Guo; Weihao Wang; Wenjuan Han
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multivariate time series forecasting is crucial across a wide range of domains. While presenting notable progress for the Transformer architecture, iTransformer still lags behind the latest MLP-based models. We attribute this performance gap to unstable inter-channel relationships. To bridge this gap, we propose EMAformer, a simple yet effective model that enhances the Transformer with an auxiliary embedding suite, akin to armor that reinforces its ability. By introducing three key inductive biases, i.e., global stability, phase sensitivity, and cross-axis specificity, EMAformer unlocks the further potential of the Transformer architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 12 real-world benchmarks and reducing forecasting errors by an average of 2.73% in MSE and 5.15% in MAE. This significantly advances the practical applicability of Transformer-based approaches for multivariate time series forecasting.
ADAPT: Adaptive Decentralized Architecture with Perception-Aligned Training for Structural Generalization in Multi-Agent RL
Authors: Zhixiang Zhang; Shuo Chen; Yexin Li; Feng Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) excels in cooperative and competitive tasks, but most architectures are tied to fixed input-output sizes and require retraining when the number of perceptible or controllable objects changes. While structural generalization techniques mitigate this, they rely on centralized training, raising concerns about scalability and privacy. We propose ADAPT, the first framework to support structural generalization under a decentralized training and decentralized execution (DTDE) paradigm. Every agent adopts an object-centric view, encoding each observed object into a feature vector and aggregating them into a variable-length set representation. To enable each agent to infer task-level contexts from this dynamic input independently, we propose a dynamic-consistency loss that enforces spatio-temporal alignment between context representations and observed environmental dynamics. Agents then condition their policies on the inferred contexts to make locally aligned decisions. For zero-shot transfer, we propose FINE (Foresight INdex for multi-agEnt), a metric that considers Q-value overestimation and enables cross-policy comparison of long-term impact, facilitating effective policy transfer. Experiments show that ADAPT surpasses existing DTDE methods and outperforms CTDE baselines in zero-shot generalization.
Multi-Objective Bilevel Learning
Authors: Zhiyao Zhang; Zhuqing Liu; Xin Zhang; Wen-Yen Chen; Jiyan Yang; Jia Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As machine learning (ML) applications grow increasingly complex in recent years, modern ML frameworks often need to address multiple potentially conflicting objectives with coupled decision variables across different layers. This creates a compelling need for multi-objective bilevel learning (MOBL). So far, however, the field of MOBL remains in its infancy and many important problems remain under-explored. This motivates us to fill this gap and systematically investigate the theoretical and algorithmic foundation of MOBL. Specifically, we consider MOBL problems with multiple conflicting objectives guided by preferences at the upper-level subproblem, where part of the inputs depend on the optimal solution of the lower-level subproblem. Our goal is to develop efficient MOBL optimization algorithms to (1) identify a preference-guided Pareto-stationary solution with low oracle complexity; and (2) enable systematic Pareto front exploration. To this end, we propose a unifying algorithmic framework called weighted-Chebyshev multi-hyper-gradient-descent (WC-MHGD) for both deterministic and stochastic settings with finite-time Pareto-stationarity convergence rate guarantees, which not only implies low oracle complexity but also induces systematic Pareto front exploration. We further conduct extensive experiments to confirm our theoretical results.
Minimum-Length Conformal Prediction Sets for Ordinal Classification
Authors: Zijian Zhang; Xinyu Chen; Yuanjie Shi; Liyuan Lillian Ma; Zifan Xu; Yan Yan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Ordinal classification has been widely applied in many high-stakes applications, e.g., medical imaging and diagnosis, where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for decision making. Conformal prediction (CP) is a general UQ framework that provides statistically valid guarantees, which is especially useful in practice. However, prior ordinal CP methods mainly focus on heuristic algorithms or restrictively require the underlying model to predict a unimodal distribution over ordinal labels. Consequently, they provide limited insight into coverage–efficiency trade-offs, or a model-agnostic and distribution-free nature favored by CP methods. To this end, we fill this gap by propose an ordinal-CP method that is model-agnostic and provides instance-level optimal prediction intervals. Specifically, we formulate conformal ordinal classification as a minimum-length covering problem at the instance level. To solve this problem, we develop a sliding-window algorithm that is optimal on each calibration data, with only a linear time complexity in K, the # of label candidates. The local optimality per instance further also improves predictive efficiency in expectation. Moreover, we propose a length-regularized variant that shrinks prediction set size while preserving coverage. Experiments on four benchmark datasets from diverse domains are conducted to demonstrate the significantly improved predictive efficiency of the proposed methods over baselines (by 15%↓ on average over four datasets).
PatchET: Learning Enzyme Temperature Properties Through Patch-Based Neural Architectures
Authors: Ziqi Zhang; Runze Yang; Longbing Cao; Zhaohong Deng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Understanding enzyme thermal properties is essential for biotechnology and protein engineering, yet experimental measurements of attributes such as temperature optimum, stability, and range remain labor-intensive and costly. Prior studies have shown that specific regions within enzyme sequences disproportionately influence thermal behavior—an aspect often overlooked by existing deep learning models. In this work, we introduce PatchET, a biologically inspired deep learning model that predicts enzyme thermal properties directly from amino acid sequences. PatchET employs a dual-stage, patch-based architecture that captures both intra-patch local features and inter-patch global dependencies, reflecting the hierarchical nature of protein thermal adaptation. Alongside the model, we curate a comprehensive benchmark, including a refined dataset for temperature optimum and the first publicly available dataset for temperature range prediction. PatchET achieves state-of-the-art performance across three key tasks—temperature optimum, stability, and range—and serves as the first dedicated model for temperature range prediction. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our architectural design. Together, PatchET and the accompanying benchmark provide a unified and generalizable framework for modeling enzyme thermal properties, offering new tools for the rational design of thermostable enzymes.
FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models
Authors: Zishuai Zhang; Hainan Zhang; Weihua Li; Qinnan Zhang; Jin Dong; Yongxin Tong; Zhiming Zheng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformer-based federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8× speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.
Differentiable Sparse Identification of Lagrangian Dynamics
Authors: Zitong Zhang; Hao Sun
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Data-driven discovery of governing equations from data remains a fundamental challenge in nonlinear dynamics. Although sparse regression techniques have advanced system identification, they struggle with rational functions and noise sensitivity in complex mechanical systems. The Lagrangian formalism offers a promising alternative, as it typically avoids rational expressions and provides a more concise representation of system dynamics. However, existing Lagrangian identification methods are significantly affected by measurement noise and limited data availability. This paper presents a novel differentiable sparse identification framework that addresses these limitations through three key contributions: (1) the first integration of cubic B-Spline approximation into Lagrangian system identification, enabling accurate representation of complex nonlinearities, (2) a robust equation discovery mechanism that effectively utilizes measurements while incorporating known physical constraints, (3) a recursive derivative computation scheme based on B-spline basis functions, effectively constraining higher-order derivatives and reducing noise sensitivity on second-order dynamical systems. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance and enables more accurate and reliable extraction of physical laws from noisy data, particularly in complex mechanical systems compared to baseline methods.
Shared & Domain Self-Adaptive Experts with Frequency-Aware Discrimination for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Jianchao Zhao; Chenhao Ding; SongLin Dong; Jiangyang Li; Qiang Wang; Yuhang He; Yihong Gong
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: This paper focuses on the Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) task, aiming to enable an agent to continuously adapt to evolving target domains while retaining previously acquired domain knowledge for effective reuse when those domains reappear. Existing shared-parameter paradigms struggle to balance adaptation and forgetting, leading to decreased efficiency and stability. To address this, we propose a frequency-aware shared and self-adaptive expert framework, consisting of two key components: (i) a dual-branch expert architecture that extracts general features and dynamically models domain-specific representations, effectively reducing cross-domain interference and repetitive learning cost; and (ii) an online Frequency-aware Domain Discriminator (FDD), which leverages the robustness of low-frequency image signals for online domain shift detection, guiding dynamic allocation of expert resources for more stable and realistic adaptation. Additionally, we introduce a Continual Repeated Shifts (CRS) benchmark to simulate periodic domain changes for more realistic evaluation. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches on both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks under standard and CRS settings, with ablations and visualizations confirming its effectiveness and robustness.
KNNDA: A New Perspective of Alignment Recovery for Partially View-Aligned Clustering
Authors: Liang Zhao; Tianqi Yue; Shubin Ma; Ziyue Wang; ZhiYuan Liu; Bo Xu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In multi-view clustering (MVC), complementary and consistent information from multiple views is integrated to improve clustering performance. However, inter-view sample correspondences may be partially missing in practice, making it difficult to learn cross-view consistency, which leads to the partially view-aligned problem (PVP). Most existing partially view-aligned clustering (PVC) methods first learn cross-view consistent representations based on known alignments, and then recover missing correspondences by measuring cross-view similarity between samples. However, such an indirect alignment recovery process depends on high-quality consistent representations and lacks effective utilization of known alignments, often resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To address this, we propose a novel direct alignment recovery perspective, instantiated as K-Nearest Neighbors Direct Alignment (KNNDA). Specifically, we first construct an alignment domain by mapping the aligned neighbors of each unaligned sample into the aligned view. Then, we compute alignment confidence based on the similarity between known aligned pairs of neighbors. In particular, we use a dynamic threshold to filter out unreliable alignments. Finally, new alignments are generated within the high-confidence alignment domain. Contrastive loss is used to learn consistent representations for clustering. Comprehensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of our module in partially view-aligned clustering.
Break the Tie: Learning Cluster-Customized Category Relationships for Categorical Data Clustering
Authors: Mingjie Zhao; Zhanpei Huang; Yang Lu; Mengke Li; Yiqun Zhang; Weifeng Su; Yiu-ming Cheung
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Categorical attributes with qualitative values are ubiquitous in cluster analysis of real datasets. Unlike the Euclidean distance of numerical attributes, the categorical attributes lack well-defined relationships of their possible values (also called categories interchangeably), which hampers the exploration of compact categorical data clusters. Although most attempts are made for developing appropriate distance metrics, they typically assume a fixed topological relationship between categories when learning distance metrics, which limits their adaptability to varying cluster structures and often leads to suboptimal clustering performance. This paper, therefore, breaks the intrinsic relationship tie of attribute categories and learns customized distance metrics suitable for flexibly and accurately revealing various cluster distributions. As a result, the fitting ability of the clustering algorithm is significantly enhanced, benefiting from the learnable category relationships. Moreover, the learned category relationships are proved to be Euclidean distance metric-compatible, enabling a seamless extension to mixed datasets that include both numerical and categorical attributes. Comparative experiments on 12 real benchmark datasets with significance tests show the superior clustering accuracy of the proposed method with an average ranking of 1.25, which is significantly higher than the 5.21 ranking of the best-performing methods. Code and extended version with detailed proofs are provided online.
HitKV: Activation Frequency Knows Which Tokens Are Important
Authors: Sanle Zhao; Yujuan Tan; Yu Jing; Zhuoxin Bai; Yue Niu; Jiayi Guo; Zongjie Wang; Ao Ren
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The demand for long-context processing in large language models (LLMs) continues to escalate alongside rapid advancements in their capabilities. However, the intermediate attention keys and values (KV cache) employed to avoid re-computations, also grow linearly with sequence length, far exceeding the memory capacity of consumer-grade GPUs. Consequently, many studies have proposed KV cache compression methods that evict unimportant tokens based on variant attention scoring strategies. These methods typically retain the KV pairs of the top-k scoring tokens under a fixed memory budget. However, they still face several limitations. First, they disregard the activation frequency of tokens, specifically the count of times tokens achieve top-k scores in the attention distribution of following tokens. The methods based on variant attention scores may incorrectly evict some high-activation-frequency yet low final-scoring tokens. Second, the activation frequency exhibits different distribution patterns across layers and tasks. Neglecting these differences negatively impacts model performance and task adaptability. Our analysis of the actual token activation frequency and its unique characteristics across layers and task types reveals potential opportunities to address these issues. In this paper, we propose HitKV, which employs hit rates to directly characterize token activation frequencies, enabling adaptive layer-aware and task-aware KV cache eviction under the uniform memory allocation strategies. Also, HitKV can be easily integrated into layer-specific memory allocation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that HitKV maintains model performance with preserving only 3% of the KV cache, achieves high-quality generation outputs in long-text generation tasks, and delivers 4× throughput improvement over baselines.
Multi-knowledge Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Multi-trait Essay Scoring
Authors: Shiman Zhao; Siyuan Liu; Zhiqi Shen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-trait Essay Scoring (MES) aims to evaluate the quality of essays across multiple traits (e.g., Language, Content, and Organization). The task can be summarized into three crucial steps: essay content encoding, trait feature learning, and multi-trait scoring. However, previous methods fall short in these steps due to neglecting essential scoring-oriented knowledge, leading to suboptimal performance. To solve these issues, we propose a novel multi-trait scoring framework with multi-knowledge enhancement. Specifically, linguistic knowledge is used to model syntactic structural relations between words, highlighting structurally-informed essay encoding. We learn trait knowledge by capturing the knowledge dependencies between traits to enhance trait-specific features. Further, score-aware ordinal knowledge is integrated to promote ordinal alignment in trait-specific features associated with score rankings, improving scoring performance. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves significant performance.
Multi-granularity Temporal Knowledge Editing over Large Language Models
Authors: Simiao Zhao; Ning Pang; Zhen Tan; Yanli Hu; Weidong Xiao; Xiang Zhao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The evolving worldly dynamics necessitate continuous revision and updating of knowledge within Large Language Models (LLMs), driving the development of Knowledge Editing (KE) techniques. Recently, a novel paradigm of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) has been proposed, emphasizing that models deployed in dynamic environments should integrate new information while retaining historical knowledge. However, we observe that current definitions and methods for TKE are insufficient, as they do not effectively capture or adapt to the fine-grained temporal dynamics inherent in real-world knowledge evolution. In this paper, we introduce the notion of multi-granularity TKE, encompassing temporal knowledge across yearly, monthly, and daily granularities, and propose a corresponding dataset, named MTKE. We argue that comprehending and retaining knowledge across different temporal granularities is crucial for LLMs to accurately reflect real-world changes. The key challenge lies in integrating new temporal knowledge at various granularities while also preserving relevant historical knowledge, thus ensuring LLMs maintain a consistent and accurate understanding over time. To achieve this, we propose a Sparse Parameter-Injected Knowledge Editing method, dubbed SPIKE, which anchors both temporal knowledge and subject positions within the model. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively preserves historical knowledge performance while accurately incorporating dynamic temporal knowledge across multi-granularity temporal scenarios.
Pareto-Based Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation for MLPs on Graphs
Authors: Wenrui Zhao; Yijun Tian; Zhichao Xu; Yawei Wang; Chuxu Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing effective information in heterogeneous graphs, achieving outstanding performance in various learning tasks. However, the heavy dependency of HGNNs on neighbors information may result in high latency, which restricts their practicality in real-world applications. Recent studies have attempted to overcome such latency in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by distilling knowledge into student models that do not rely on graph structure. But these approaches primarily focus on replicating teachers' predictive outcomes while neglecting the structural knowledge they encoded. This limitation makes such approach less effective when graphs become complex, particularly on heterogeneous graphs. Motivated by this challenge, we propose HGKD, a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation framework that transfers both structural knowledge and predictive outcomes from HGNN teachers to a multi-layer perceptron student. Additionally, we provide two variants of HGKD that help the student learn from multiple teacher models through Pareto learning and incorporate low-cost neighbor information. We evaluate HGKD and its variants on a range of heterogeneous graph datasets. The results demonstrate that our student model achieves performance comparable to or exceeding that of HGNN teachers, despite not relying on graph structures during inference.
Divide, Conquer and Unite: Hierarchical Style-Recalibrated Prototype Alignment for Federated Medical Segmentation
Authors: Xingyue Zhao; Wenke Huang; Xingguang Wang; Haoyu Zhao; Linghao Zhuang; Anwen Jiang; Guancheng Wan; Mang Ye
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Federated learning enables multiple medical institutions to train a global model without sharing data, yet feature heterogeneity from diverse scanners or protocols remains a major challenge. Many existing works attempt to address this issue by leveraging model representations (e.g., mean feature vectors) to correct local training; however, they often face two key limitations: 1) Incomplete Contextual Representation Learning: Current approaches primarily focus on final-layer features, overlooking critical multi-level cues and thus diluting essential context for accurate segmentation. 2) Layerwise Style Bias Accumulation: Although utilizing representations can partially align global features, these methods neglect domain-specific biases within intermediate layers, allowing style discrepancies to build up and reduce model robustness. To address these challenges, we propose FedBCS to bridge feature representation gaps via domain-invariant contextual prototypes alignment. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-domain adaptive style recalibration into prototype construction that not only decouples content-style representations but also learns optimal style parameters, enabling more robust domain-invariant prototypes. Furthermore, we design a context-aware dual-level prototype alignment method that extracts domain-invariant prototypes from different layers of both encoder and decoder and fuses them with contextual information for finer-grained representation alignment. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits remarkable performance.