GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks
Authors: Ming Li; Yi Wang; Chengling Gao; Lu Bai; Yujie Fang; Xiaosheng Zhuang; Pietro Lio
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Hypergraphs provide a natural and expressive framework for modeling high-order relationships, enabling the representation of group-wise interactions beyond pairwise connections. While hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have shown promise for learning on such structures, existing models often rely on shallow message passing and lack the ability to extract multiscale patterns. Framelet-based techniques offer a principled solution by decomposing signals into multiple frequency bands. However, most prior framelet systems, particularly Haar-type ones, are sensitive to node ordering and fail to ensure consistent representations under permutation, leading to instability in hypergraph learning. To address this, we propose Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks (PEF-HNN), a novel framework that integrates multiscale framelet analysis with permutation-consistent learning. We construct a new family of permutation equivariant Haar-type framelets specifically designed for hypergraphs, supported by theoretical analysis of their stability and decomposition properties. Built upon these framelets, PEF-HNN incorporates both low-pass and high-pass components across multiple scales into a unified neural architecture. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets, including three homophilic and four heterophilic hypergraphs, as well as two real-world datasets for visual object classification, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, consistently outperforming existing HNN baselines and highlighting the advantages of permutation equivariant framelet design in hypergraph representation learning.
Counterfactual-based Cognitive Alignment In-Context Learning for Relation Extraction
Authors: Qibin Li; Shengyuan Bai; Nai Zhou; Nianmin Yao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable In-Context learning (ICL) capabilities for relation extraction (RE). While ICL has shown promise in RE tasks, current approaches face challenges in example selection and utilization. These challenges stem from the misalignment between example selection methods and LLMs' inherent cognitive processing mechanisms, particularly in pattern recognition and relational reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Counterfactual Cognitive Alignment (CCA), a novel framework that systematically enhances ICL performance in RE by aligning example selection with cognitive principles underlying human relational reasoning. The framework incorporates a cognitive-inspired counterfactual generation mechanism that creates semantically diverse yet relationally coherent examples, mirroring human "what-if" reasoning processes. Additionally, it employs a cognitive alignment approach that integrates structural identification features with semantic understanding to better align with LLMs cognitive processing patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple RE benchmarks reveal the effectiveness of our cognitive alignment approach through the synergistic integration of counterfactual reasoning and cognitively-guided selection.
AIM: Manifold-based Data Filtering for Representation Finetuning
Authors: Qing Li; Qibin Zheng; Yi Liu; Xingchun Diao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Representation Finetuning (ReFT) has recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for adapting pretrained language models by editing hidden representations rather than model weights. However, our preliminary experiments reveal that ReFT is notably more sensitive to training data quality compared to traditional parameter-efficient finetuning methods, particularly to samples with incorrect labels, which can severely degrade performance. Inspired by prior work demonstrating that the hidden representations of generalizable neural networks exhibit low-dimensional manifold structures, we hypothesize that effective generalization in ReFT requires geometrically structured transformations between pre- and post-intervention representations. This implies that the intervention vectors representing these transformations should form a low-dimensional manifold, rendering the inconsistent transformations induced by label noise as detectable geometric outliers. To leverage this insight, we introduce Aligning Interventions on a learned Manifold (AIM), a representation-based data filtering method for ReFT, which identifies high-quality training samples by measuring the geometric consistency of their intervention vectors with respect to a robust reference manifold derived via principal component analysis on trusted data. Extensive experiments on both commonsense and arithmetic reasoning tasks confirm the effectiveness of AIM, showing consistent improvements over strong data selection baselines across multiple model scales.
Prototype-Guided Supervision for Graph Learning with Noisy and Sparse Labels
Authors: Qiyu Li; Xianxian Li; De Li; Jinyan Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Graph learning faces major challenges under noisy and sparse supervision, where corrupted labels mislead representation learning and impair generalization. Prior work proposes robust training strategies such as correction, reweighting, and denoising to reduce the influence of noisy labels. However, most methods still optimize directly on training nodes using their possibly corrupted labels as supervision signals. In this work, we propose a prototype-guided framework that replaces direct label supervision over training nodes with semantic supervision derived from class-level prototypes. Each prototype is formed by aggregating representations of nodes sharing the same observed label and serves as a semantic anchor for guiding the classifier. To address the inherent supervision sparsity introduced by limited prototype instances, we introduce a dual-branch mixup strategy that integrates prototypes with high-confidence nodes through intra- and inter-class interpolation, which enhances supervision coverage and improves representation continuity. We further constrain the spatial variance of these samples to promote intra-class compactness. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the constructed prototypes remain aligned with true class semantics under bounded noise rates. Experiments on node classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our approach under label noise and limited supervision.
Transformers in Pseudo-Random Number Generation: A Dual Perspective on Theory and Practice
Authors: Ran Li; Lingshu Zeng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) are high-nonlinear processes, and they are key blocks in optimization of Large language models. Transformers excel at processing complex nonlinear relationships. Thus it is reasonable to generate high-quality pseudo-random numbers based on transformers. In this paper, we explore this question from both theoretical and practical perspectives, highlighting the potential benefits and implications of Transformer in PRNGs. We theoretically demonstrate that decoder-only Transformer models with Chain-of-Thought can simulate both the Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) and Mersenne Twister (MT) PRNGs. Based on this, we conclude that the log-precision decoder-only Transformer can represent non-uniform AC0. Our simulative theoretical findings are validated through experiments. The random numbers generated by Transformer-based PRNGs successfully pass the majority of NIST tests, whose heat maps exhibit clear statistical randomness. Finally, we assess their capability in prediction attacks.
AdaCuRL: Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Invalid Sample Mitigation and Historical Revisiting
Authors: Renda Li; Hailang Huang; Fei Wei; Feng Xiong; Yong Wang; Xiangxiang Chu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated considerable potential for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). 
However, existing methods suffer from Gradient Starvation and Policy Degradation when training directly on samples with mixed difficulty. To mitigate this, prior approaches leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data, but the construction of high-quality CoT annotations remains labor-intensive. Alternatively, curriculum learning strategies have been explored but frequently encounter challenges, such as difficulty mismatch, reliance on manual curriculum design, and catastrophic forgetting.
To address these issues, we propose AdaCuRL, a Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates coarse-to-fine difficulty estimation with adaptive curriculum scheduling. This approach dynamically aligns data difficulty with model capability and incorporates a data revisitation mechanism to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, AdaCuRL employs adaptive reference and sparse KL strategies to prevent Policy Degradation. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AdaCuRL consistently achieves significant performance improvements on both LLMs and MLLMs.
Dormant Backdoor: Weaponizing Model Finetuning for Feasible Backdoor Attacks Against Pretrained Models
Authors: Ruitao Li; Jiakai Wang; Hairong Chen; Huihu Ding; Jinghan Zhou; Renshuai Tao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: As the pretraining-finetuning paradigm becomes dominant in modern AI, the security of model supply chains faces new risks from backdoor attacks. Existing work primarily studies backdoors injected during pretraining and treats subsequent finetuning with clean data as a defense, while recent finetuning-activated attacks assume white-box access to the downstream data distribution, which is rarely realistic in practice. We introduce Dormant Backdoor, a finetuning-activated attack that requires no prior knowledge of downstream tasks. Instead of binding the backdoor to static input patterns, Dormant Backdoor exploits the universal dynamics of gradient-based optimization as a process-as-trigger mechanism. We formulate the attack as a bilevel optimization problem that simulates the victim's finetuning trajectory on proxy data, and jointly optimizes the poisoned model and trigger under lethality, utility, and stealth objectives. Before finetuning, the poisoned model remains behaviorally close to a clean model and can evade existing backdoor detectors; after finetuning, the same adaptation process reliably amplifies the backdoor on diverse downstream datasets and finetuning strategies. Our results reveal a previously underexplored class of process-as-trigger vulnerabilities and highlight the need for defenses that explicitly secure the model adaptation process.
Assemble Your Crew: Automatic Multi-agent Communication Topology Design via Autoregressive Graph Generation
Authors: Shiyuan Li; Yixin Liu; Qingsong Wen; Chengqi Zhang; Shirui Pan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) based on large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful solution for dealing with complex problems across diverse domains. The effectiveness of MAS is critically dependent on its collaboration topology, which has become a focal point for automated design research. However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on a template graph modification paradigm with a predefined set of agents and hard-coded interaction structures, significantly limiting their adaptability to task-specific requirements. To address these limitations, we reframe MAS design as a conditional autoregressive graph generation task, where both the system composition and structure are designed jointly. We propose ARG-Designer, a novel autoregressive model that operationalizes this paradigm by constructing the collaboration graph from scratch. Conditioned on a natural language task query, ARG-Designer sequentially and dynamically determines the required number of agents, selects their appropriate roles from an extensible pool, and establishes the optimal communication links between them. This generative approach creates a customized topology in a flexible and extensible manner, precisely tailored to the unique demands of different tasks. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks demonstrate that ARG-Designer not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also enjoys significantly greater token efficiency and enhanced extensibility.
MoE-Guided Graph Diffusion for Oriented Molecule Design
Authors: Shuochen Li; Xiangqi Guo; Huobin Tan; Lei Shi
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Designing molecules with desired properties, aka the oRiented molEcule Design (RED), is a fundamental task in chemistry and materials science. While graph diffusion models (GDMs) and reinforcement learning techniques (RL) show promise in molecule structure generation and property optimization stages individually, their integration in the unified RED task often suffers from poor compatibility. The large variance among candidate molecular structures generated by GDMs can be amplified in the iterative optimization process of RL, leading to slow and unstable convergence. In this work, motivated by the adaptive and divide-and-conquer characteristics of Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, we propose a novel framework called MoE-Guided Graph Diffusion Model (MEGD) that incorporates the MoE architecture to guide the orchestration of GDM and RL, promoting faster and more stable convergence in the design process. MEGD is evaluated on benchmark datasets optimizing the physical and chemical properties of AI-generated molecular structures. On all three datasets, our method outperforms the best of 9 alternative models by 7.73% on the target structural properties, while not penalizing other important application-level quality metrics of the generated molecules. A real-world case study on an emerging class of material, i.e., metal-organic framework, is also conducted, which further demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in accomplishing the RED task.
MIDILM: A Dual-Path Model for Controllable Text-to-MIDI Generation
Authors: Shuyu Li; Dooho Choi; Yunsick Sung
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-MIDI generation offers editable and hierarchical control over symbolic music generation. Previous approaches either convert text into a limited set of musical attributes and generate music based on these attributes, which limits semantic controllability, or use end-to-end models that map text directly to music without deeply aligning the features of both modalities, often resulting in a lack of structural coherence and mismatches in key, meter, and tempo. We propose MIDILM, which addresses these limitations by employing text conditioning with a dual-path decoder that processes textual and musical information through separate feedforward paths following a shared masked self-attention mechanism. On the MidiCaps benchmark, MIDILM outperformed the strongest baseline, with relative improvements ranging from 6.07% on CLAP to 144.77% on TB across semantic alignment and structural metrics. These gains confirm its ability to enhance both semantic controllability and structural coherence. Collectively, we expect that MIDILM will serve as a useful reference framework for future investigations into controllable and structurally faithful cross-modal music generation.
State Proficiency-Based Adaptive Fine-Tuning for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Songlin Li; Wei Xiao; Hao Wu; Xiaodan Zhang; Daolong An; Shuai Lü
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning, achieving efficient performance improvement while maintaining training stability remains a critical challenge for effective fine-tuning. Existing O2O methods usually focus on the balance between policy improvement and policy constraint during online fine-tuning. However, they often overlook sample differences, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we identify that  the effectiveness of policy learning exhibits significant variation across states. Therefore, we propose the notion of state proficiency to capture the degree of effective learning in a given state. We propose State Proficiency-Based Adaptive Fine-Tuning (SPA), a straightforward yet effective method that establishes proficiency-based sample priorities in policy optimization to facilitate effective fine-tuning. Specifically, SPA focuses on low proficiency samples during policy improvement to enhance sample efficiency, while emphasizing high proficiency samples during policy constraint to ensure stable training. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that SPA achieves significant improvements over existing methods, attaining state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark.
GMAI-VL & GMAI-VL-5.5M: A Large Vision-Language Model and a Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset Towards General Medical AI
Authors: Tianbin Li; Yanzhou Su; Wei Li; Bin Fu; Zhe Chen; Ziyan Huang; Guoan Wang; Chenglong Ma; Ying Chen; Ming Hu; Yanjun Li; Pengcheng Chen; Shixiang Tang; Xiaowei Hu; Zhongying Deng; Yuanfeng Ji; Jin Ye; Yu Qiao; Junjun He
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite significant advancements in general AI, its effectiveness in the medical domain is limited by the lack of specialized medical knowledge. 
To address this, we formulate GMAI-VL-5.5M, a multimodal medical dataset created by converting hundreds of specialized medical datasets with various annotations into high-quality image-text pairs. 
This dataset offers comprehensive task coverage, diverse modalities, and rich image-text data. 
Building upon this dataset, we develop GMAI-VL, a 7B-parameter general medical vision-language model, with a three-stage training strategy that enhances the integration of visual and textual information. 
This approach significantly improves the model's ability to process multimodal data, supporting accurate diagnoses and clinical decision-making. 
Experiments show that GMAI-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal medical tasks, including visual question answering and medical image diagnosis.
HAP: Harmonized Amplitude Perturbation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Wenqian Li; Pengfei Fang; Hui Xue
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) remains a significant challenge due to substantial distribution shifts between source and target domains. While prior approaches primarily focus on spatial alignment, they often overlook discrepancies in the frequency domain. In this paper, we reveal frequency band discretization as a key phenomenon, characterized by intra-domain low-frequency dominance, inter-domain amplitude divergence, and limited high-frequency variation. This spectral disharmony biases models toward low-frequency components, leading to spectral collapse. We quantify spectral collapse via the effective rank, a principled measure of spectral diversity. To mitigate spectral collapse, we propose Harmonized Amplitude Perturbation (HAP), a frequency-domain augmentation strategy that perturbs the amplitude spectrum via frequency-aware gains sampled from Harmonized Distributions, while fixing the phase spectrum to maintain semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on both Cross-Domain Few-Shot Image Classification and Object Detection benchmarks demonstrate that HAP effectively increases spectral diversity and consistently improves generalization, outperforming state-of-the-art methods without introducing extra model complexity.
Semi-Supervised Regression by Preserving Ranking Relationships Between Close Unlabeled Samples
Authors: Ximing Li; Jiaxuan Jiang; Changchun Li; You Lu; Renchu Guan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) aims to improve the learning performance of supervised learning with a large number of unlabeled samples. The existing SSL methods such as FixMatch and FlexMatch select unlabeled samples with high-confident pseudo-labels and make consistency constraints between their weak and strong augmentations. Unfortunately, they cannot be applied Semi-Supervised Regression (SSR) because regression predictions can not reflect the confidence of pseudo-labels. To solve this, a recent SSR method RankUp incorporates an auxiliary ranking task by leveraging sample pairs with high-confident pseudo-ranks. In this paper, we upgrade Rankup to a novel SSR method, namely Semi-Supervised Regression by Ranking Close Unlabeled Samples (SSR-RCUS). Its basic idea is reconstructing closed mixup augmented samples with high-confident pseudo-ranks under a monotonicity assumption, and then applying them to the auxiliary ranking task to improve regression performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of SSR-RCUS on benchmark datasets, and empirical results demonstrate that SSR-RCUS can outperform the existing baselines in various settings, especially when labeled data are scarce.
Uncovering Hidden Degeneration: A Physics-Guided Bidirectional Inference Framework for Industrial Time Series Prediction
Authors: Xingwang Li; Fei Teng; Xin Wu; Qiang Duan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Hidden degenerations in industrial time series often precede observable failures, they remain undetected by standard monitoring systems until anomalies become apparent. This gap between microscopic degradation and macroscopic observation renders conventional predictors inherently reactive, as they rely on correlations in sensor data rather than uncovering the underlying, physics‑consistent degradation states. Crucially, the microscopic mechanisms governing system evolution depend on macroscopic state variables—whose measurements are expectations over microscopic probability distributions—so purely data‑driven “top‑down” or purely physics‑guided “bottom‑up” approaches cannot forecast degeneration‑entangled industrial faults. To address these challenges, we propose a Physics-Guided Bidirectional Inference Framework that represents hidden microscopic states from macroscopic measurements. Our approach uniquely combines: (1) bottom-up physics-based simulation using Continuum Damage Mechanics to model micro-scale damage evolution under environmental stressors, and (2) top-down probabilistic inference via maximum entropy formalism to estimate latent microstate distributions from sparse sensor data. This bidirectional mechanism enables early failure prediction by bridging observable measurements with unobservable degeneration. Validation on real-world railway infrastruc datasets demonstrates significant improvements in early fault prediction compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our method establishes a new paradigm for safety-critical industrial applications requiring reliable prediction of hidden degeneration processes.
Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding for Faster Autoregressive Image Generation
Authors: Xingyao Li; Fengzhuo Zhang; Cunxiao Du; Hui Ji
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite significant progress in auto-regressive image generation, inference remains slow due to the sequential nature of AR models and the ambiguity of image tokens, even when using speculative decoding. Recent works attempt to address this with relaxed speculative decoding but lack theoretical grounding. In this paper, we establish the theoretical basis of relaxed SD and propose COOL-SD, an annealed relaxation of speculative decoding built on two key insights. The first analyzes the total variation (TV) distance between the target model and relaxed speculative decoding and yields an optimal resampling distribution that minimizes an upper bound of the distance. The second uses perturbation analysis to reveal an annealing behaviour in relaxed speculative decoding, motivating our annealed design. Together, these insights enable COOL-SD to generate images faster with comparable quality, or achieve better quality at similar latency. Experiments validate the effectiveness of COOL-SD, showing consistent improvements over prior methods in speed-quality trade-offs.