Singapore

Multi-class unsupervised anomaly detection endeavors to establish a unified model capable of identifying anomalies across multiple classes when only normal data is accessible. However, widely employed reconstruction-based networks often struggle with the &#39;identical shortcut&#39; issue of both normal and anomalous samples being reconstructed equally well, consequently failing to identify outliers. Although current methodologies attempt to tackle this problem, they remain susceptible to infiltration of anomalous information. In contrast, we introduce a novel scheme to make use of the `identical shortcut&#39; phenomenon rather than pursue to eliminate it. Firstly, inspired by our interesting observation that normal and abnormal regions manifest distinct behaviors when encountering diverse masks, we devise a multi-branch masked autoencoder tailored for multi-class image reconstruction. Subsequently, we introduce a parallel masking scheme to magnify the reconstruction disparity between normal and abnormal regions when confronted with various masks. Ultimately, we propose a reconstruction association discrepancy learning method as a new anomaly localization criterion. The effectiveness of our approach is validated both quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving state-of-the-art results.

AAAI 2026

MaskAD: Parallel Masked Autoencoder for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

parallel modeling

masked autoencoder

unsupervised anomaly detection

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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AAAI 2023

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.

Multi-class unsupervised anomaly detection endeavors to establish a unified model capable of identifying anomalies across multiple classes when only normal data is accessible. However, widely employed reconstruction-based networks often struggle with the 'identical shortcut' issue of both normal and anomalous samples being reconstructed equally well, consequently failing to identify outliers. Although current methodologies attempt to tackle this problem, they remain susceptible to infiltration of anomalous information. In contrast, we introduce a novel scheme to make use of the `identical shortcut' phenomenon rather than pursue to eliminate it. Firstly, inspired by our interesting observation that normal and abnormal regions manifest distinct behaviors when encountering diverse masks, we devise a multi-branch masked autoencoder tailored for multi-class image reconstruction. Subsequently, we introduce a parallel masking scheme to magnify the reconstruction disparity between normal and abnormal regions when confronted with various masks. Ultimately, we propose a reconstruction association discrepancy learning method as a new anomaly localization criterion. The effectiveness of our approach is validated both quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving state-of-the-art results.

technical paper

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.

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-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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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.

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly relies on other LLMs acting as judges. However, current evaluation paradigms typically yield a single score or ranking, answering which model is better but not why. While essential for benchmarking, these top-level scores obscure the specific, actionable reasons behind a model's performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLEAR, an interactive, open-source package for LLM-based error analysis. CLEAR first generates per-instance textual feedback, then it creates a set of system-level error issues, and quantifies the prevalence of each identified issue. Our package also provides users with an interactive dashboard that allows for a comprehensive error analysis through aggregate visualizations, applies interactive filters to isolate specific issues or score ranges, and drills down to the individual instances that exemplify a particular behavioral pattern. We demonstrate CLEAR analysis for RAG and Math benchmarks, and showcase its utility through a user case study.

CLEAR: Error Analysis via LLM-as-a-Judge Made Easy

The floods caused by the Isolated High-Level Depression (DANA) in the Valencian Community in October 2024 destroyed and damaged hundreds of thousands of personal photographs, erasing key pieces of collective and emotional memory. Within the project Recuperar las Memorias, we present an AI-based system for automated photo reconstruction, designed to support the recovery of more than 200,000 affected images. The system integrates YOLOv8 and SAM2 for automatic detection of damaged regions, followed by context-aware inpainting to restore visual coherence. Special modules are included for facial restoration, preserving identity in one of the most emotionally critical aspects of personal photographs. The tool is deployed as a web application that enables both single-image and batch restoration, making it accessible to non-expert users. Preliminary evaluation, combining human perceptual studies and automatic metrics (LPIPS), shows consistent alignment between subjective and objective assessments of quality. This demonstration highlights how advances in computer vision can be mobilised in real-world crisis contexts, placing AI at the service of cultural heritage, dignity, and memory preservation.

AI for Memory Preservation: Automated Restoration of Photographs Damaged by Floods

Metalenses have been widely recognized as a key building block of next-generation optical systems, offering unprecedented advantages in compactness, lightweight design, and scalable manufacturing compared to traditional refractive optics. Despite this promise, practical use is limited by optical aberrations, blur, and illumination sensitivity, which degrade both visual quality and machine perception. In this demonstration, we present an end-to-end metalens vision system—from hardware sensing with a custom-built RGB metalens camera, to physics-informed imaging and real-time restoration, and finally to downstream vision applications such as object detection and depth estimation. By integrating spatially-aware attention enhancement and reinforcement learning-based illumination control into a real-time system, our solution transforms degraded raw captures into high-fidelity images that are both visually interpretable and functionally reliable for machine vision. This AI-powered pipeline highlights metalenses as a cornerstone for next-generation imaging, where advances in optics and machine intelligence jointly drive the future of visual perception.

Next-Generation Metalens Vision System: Powered by AI and Applied to AI

We present AgentSeer, an interactive observability framework for agentic AI systems. Unlike conventional tracing tools that expose raw spans or model-centric metrics, AgentSeer introduces a dual graph decomposition constructed through a deterministic rule-based parser: a temporal action graph, where each prompt or tool invocation is represented as a distinct action, and a component graph capturing architectural relations among agents, tools, and memory modules. Beyond visualization, AgentSeer enables action-level red teaming, where jailbreak payloads are systematically attached to every action node (including agent messages, tool calls, and memory retrievals) to uncover vulnerabilities invisible to model-level testing. Our demonstration features a six-agent hierarchical testbed with interactive visualization and deployment-oriented safety evaluation applied directly on the same prompts and contexts, systematically revealing high-risk interactions, context-dependent vulnerabilities, and emergent behaviors. By combining structured decomposition, automated red teaming, and rule-based reliability, AgentSeer establishes a safety-first methodology for observability in multi-agent AI.

AgentSeer: Visualizing and Evaluating Temporal Actions in Agentic AI Systems

In the k-Kemeny problem, we are given an ordinal election, i.e., a collection of votes ranking the candidates from best to worst, and we seek the smallest number of swaps of adjacent candidates that ensure that the election has at most k different rankings. We study this problem for a number of structured domains, including the single-peaked, single-crossing, group-separable, and Euclidean ones. We obtain two kinds of results: (1) We show that k-Kemeny remains intractable under most of these domains, even for k=2, and (2) we use k-Kemeny to rank these domains in terms of their diversity.

Diversity of Structured Domains via k-Kemeny Scores

Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios where no available course of action fully satisfies all operational constraints (e.g., operating procedures, rules, laws, norms, and goals). To achieve goals in accordance with human expectations and values, agents must go beyond their trained policies and instead construct, evaluate, and justify candidate courses of action. These processes require contextual ``knowledge'' that may lie outside prior (policy) training. This paper characterizes requirements for agent decision making in these contexts. It also identifies the types of knowledge agents require to make decisions robust to agent goals and aligned with human expectations. Drawing on both analysis and empirical case studies, we examine how agents need to integrate normative, pragmatic, and situational understanding to select and then to pursue more aligned courses of action in complex, real-world environments.

Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Resolution of Conflicts in Operational Constraints

In diffusion auctions, sellers can leverage an underlying social network to increase the number of participants of an auction and thus the auction's revenue. Specifically, sellers can incentivise participants of their auction to diffuse the information about the auction through the network. While numerous variants of such auctions have been recently studied in the literature, the strategic perspective of running diffusion auctions has not been investigated. 

Our contribution is threefold. First, we introduce a logical formalism that captures the dynamics of diffusion and its strategic dimension. Second, for such a logic we provide model checking procedures that allow one to verify such properties as Nash equilibrium, and that pave the way towards checking the existence of sellers' strategies. Third, we establish computational complexity results for the presented algorithms.

Formal Verification of Diffusion Auctions

Recent neurophysiological studies have revealed that the early visual cortex can rapidly learn global image context, as evidenced by a sparsification of population responses and a reduction in mean activity when exposed to familiar versus novel image contexts. This phenomenon has been attributed primarily to local recurrent interactions, rather than changes in feedforward or feedback pathways—supported by both empirical findings and circuit-level modeling. Recurrent neural circuits capable of simulating these effects have been shown to reshape the geometry of neural manifolds, enhancing robustness and invariance to irrelevant variations. In this study, we employ a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based autoencoder to investigate, from a functional perspective, how familiarity training can induce sensitivity to global context in the early layers of a deep neural network. We hypothesize that rapid learning operates via fast weights, which encode transient or short-term memory traces, and we explore the use of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to implement such fast weights within each Transformer layer. Our results show that:
(1) Familiarity training progressively increases alignment between early-layer and higher-layer latent representations, indicating growing sensitivity to global context at early stages of processing; (2) Attention maps across layers become increasingly aligned, exhibiting more coherent and consistent figure-ground awareness; (3) These effects are significantly amplified by the incorporation of LoRA-based fast weights. Together, these findings suggest that a hybrid fast-and-slow weight architecture may provide a viable computational model for studying the functional consequences of rapid global context learning in the brain.

Modeling Rapid Contextual Learning in the Visual Cortex with Fast-Weight Deep Autoencoder Networks

Graph-structured data plays a pivotal role in modeling complex relationships. However, real-world graphs are often incomplete due to data collection and observational constraints, severely limiting the effectiveness of modern graph learning pipelines. While existing Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) methods attempt to refine graph structures for improved downstream performance, they are typically label-dependent, computationally expensive, and inherently \textit{transductive}, limiting their applicability in practical scenarios.

In this work, we present a novel \textit{feature-centric} graph data augmentation framework that bypasses explicit structure modeling by operating directly in the embedding space. Through a self-supervised inverse masking process, our method captures latent ties between observed and complete graphs, enabling recovery of unobserved structural signals through refined node representations. To enhance robustness under noisy and sparse supervision, we introduce a message regularizer and a bootstrap strategy for effective training and generalization.
Evaluated on ten graph datasets spanning multiple domains, our approach, \textbf{SelfAug}, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency across \textit{inductive} and \textit{cold-start} settings, highlighting its potential as a scalable and generalizable solution for real-world graph learning scenarios.

Learning the Latent Structure: A Feature-Centric Approach to Graph Data Augmentation

Machine learning (ML)-powered systems are capable of reproducing and often amplifying undesired biases embedded in society, emphasizing the importance of operating under practices that enable the study and understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of ML pipelines. This supports the emergence of documentation frameworks with the idea that “any remedy for bias starts with awareness of its existence.” However, a resource that can formally describe ML pipelines in terms of detected biases is still missing. To address this gap, we present the Doc-BiasO ontology, a resource that sets out to create an integrated vocabulary of biases defined in the Trustworthy AI literature and their measures, as well as to incorporate relevant domain terminology and relationships between them. Overseeing ontology engineering best practices, we reuse existing vocabularies on machine learning and AI to foster knowledge sharing and interoperability between the actors concerned with its research, development, regulation, and others. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of Doc-BiasO with an experiment on an existing benchmark and as part of a neuro-symbolic system. Overall, our main objective is to contribute towards clarifying existing terminology on bias research as it rapidly expands to all areas of AI and to improve the interpretation of bias in data and downstream impact through its documentation.

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CLEAR: Error Analysis via LLM-as-a-Judge Made Easy

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