AAAI 2026

4,920 papers

Backdoor Attacks on Open Vocabulary Object Detectors via Multi-Modal Prompt Tuning

Ankita Raj, Chetan Arora

Towards Benchmarking Privacy Vulnerabilities in Selective Forgetting with Large Language Models

Wei Qian, Chenxu Zhao, Yangyi Li, Mengdi Huai

Beyond I’m Sorry, I Can’t: Dissecting Large-Language-Model Refusal

Nirmalendu Prakash, Yeo Wei Jie, Amir Abdullah, Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria

AdvBDGen: A Robust Framework for Generating Adaptive and Stealthy Backdoors in LLM Alignment

Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Udari Madhushani Sehwag, Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess, Cho-Yu Jason Chiang, Furong Huang

Refine and Align: Confidence Calibration Through Multi-Agent Interaction in VQA

Ayush Pandey, Jai Bardhan, Ishita Jain, Ramya S Hebbalaguppe, Rohan Raju Dhanakshirur

LieCraft: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Deceptive Capabilities in Language Models

Matthew Lyle Olson, Neale Ratzlaff, Musashi Hinck, Tri Nguyen, VASUDEV LAL

Realist and Pluralist Conceptions of Intelligence and Their Implications on AI Research

Ninell Oldenburg, Ruchira Dhar, Anders Søgaard

CTPD: Cross Tokenizer Preference Distillation

Truong Nguyen, Phi Van Dat, Ngan Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Trung Le

Intrinsic Barriers and Practical Pathways for Human–AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

Aran Nayebi

A Tale of Two Identities: An Ethical Audit of AI-Crafted Synthetic Personas

Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jiayi Li, Yingfan Zhou, Sarah Rajtmajer, Shomir Wilson

Quiet Feature Learning in Algorithmic Tasks

Prudhviraj Naidu, Zixian Wang, Leon Bergen, Ramamohan Paturi

SharedRep-RLHF: A Shared Representation Approach to RLHF with Diverse Preferences

Arpan Mukherjee, Marcello Bullo, Deniz Gündüz

Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping

Dena Mujtaba, Brian Hu, Anthony Hoogs, Arslan Basharat

STACK: Adversarial Attacks on LLM Safeguard Pipelines

Ian R. Mckenzie, Oskar John Hollinsworth, Tom Tseng, Xander Davies, Stephen Casper

Misalignment from Treating Means as Ends

Henrik Marklund, Alex Infanger, Benjamin Van Roy

DETONATE – A Benchmark for Text-to-Image Alignment and Kernelized Direct Preference Optimization

Renjith Prasad Kaippilly Mana, Abhilekh Borah, Hasnat Md Abdullah, Chathurangi Shyalika, Gurpreet Singh

Mitigating Self-Preference by Authorship Obfuscation

Taslim Mahbub, Shi Feng

Targeting Misalignment: A Conflict-Aware Framework for Reward-Model-based LLM Alignment

Zixuan Liu, Siavash H. Khajavi, Guangkai Jiang, Xinru Liu

DarkBench+: An Extended Benchmark for Evaluating Dark Patterns in Large Language Models

Yaowen Liu, Shenjia Jing, Yufei Wei, Shoumin Zhang, Jinglu Zhang

On the Alignment of Large Language Models with Global Human Opinion

Yang Liu, Masahiro Kaneko, Chenhui Chu

MRACL: Multi-Reward Space Guided Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

Wenxuan Liu, Liangyu Huo, Yi Jing, Xiyuan Zhang, jian xie

SRAM: Shape-Realism Alignment Metric for No Reference 3D Shape Evaluation

Sheng Liu, Tianyu Luan, Phani Nuney, Xuelu Feng, Junsong Yuan

Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Attacks on Event-Driven Stock Prediction Models

Aofan Liu, Haoxuan Li, Hongjian Xing, Yuguo Yin, Zijun Li

How Much Do Large Language Model Cheat on Evaluation? Benchmarking Overestimation Under the One-Time-Pad-Based Framework

Zi Liang, Liantong Yu, Zhang Shiyu, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu

Editing as Unlearning: Are Knowledge Editing Methods Strong Baselines for Large Language Model Unlearning?

Zexi Li, Xiangzhu Wang, William F. Shen, Meghdad Kurmanji, Xinchi Qiu

Bolster Hallucination Detection via Prompt-Guided Data Augmentation

Wenyun Li, Zheng Zhang, Dongmei Jiang, Xiangyuan Lan

TORA: Train Once, Realign Anytime for Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Weichen Li, Waleed Mustafa, Marcio Monteiro, Puyu Wang, Marius Kloft

How Bias Binds: Measuring Hidden Associations for Bias Control in Text-to-Image Compositions

Jeng-Lin Li, Ming-Ching Chang, Wei-Chao Chen

StyleBreak: Revealing Alignment Vulnerabilities in Large Audio-Language Models via Style-Aware Audio Jailbreak

Hongyi Li, Chengxuan Zhou, Chu Wang, Sicheng Liang, Yanting Chen

ARGH-Mark: Anchor-Synchronized Watermarking with Hamming Correction for Robust and Quality-Preserving LLM Attribution

He Li, Xiaojun Chen, Jingcheng He, Zhendong Zhao, Shuguang Yuan

STELAR-VISION: Self-Topology-Aware Efficient Learning for Aligned Reasoning in Vision

Chen Li, Han Zhang, Zhantao Yang, Fangyi Chen, Zihan Wang

MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control

Juyong Lee, Dongyoon Hahm, June Suk Choi, W. Bradley Knox, Kimin Lee

Selective Weak-to-Strong Generalization

Hao Lang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li

Dropouts in Confidence: Moral Uncertainty in Human-LLM Alignment

Jea Kwon, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Sungwon Park, Meeyoung Cha

Cost-Minimized Label-Flipping Poisoning Attack to LLM Alignment

Shigeki Kusaka, Keita Saito, Mikoto Kudo, Takumi Tanabe, Akifumi Wachi

Beautiful Images, Toxic Words: Understanding and Addressing Offensive Text in Generated Images

Aditya Kumar, Tom Blanchard, Adam Dziedzic, Franziska Boenisch

Align to Structure: Aligning Large Language Models with Structural Information

Zae Myung Kim, Anand Ramachandran, Farideh Tavazoee, Joo-Kyung Kim, Oleg Rokhlenko

Transparent Networks for Multivariate Time Series

Minkyu Kim, Suan Lee, Jinho Kim

Moral Change or Noise? On Problems of Aligning AI with Temporally Unstable Human Feedback

Vijay Keswani, Cyrus Cousins, Breanna Nguyen, Vincent Conitzer, Hoda Heidari

Benchmarking XAI Explanations with Human-Aligned Evaluations

Rémi Kazmierczak, Steve Azzolin, Eloïse Berthier, Anna Hedström, Patricia Delhomme

Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Resolution of Conflicts in Operational Constraints

Steven J. Jones, Robert E. Wray, John E. Laird

Uncovering and Aligning Anomalous Attention Heads to Defend Against NLP Backdoor Attacks

Haotian Jin, Yang Li, Haihui Fan, Lin Shen, Xiangfang Li

TAPO: Dynamic Teacher and Perturbed Answer Injection for Policy Optimization

Maowei Jiang, Zihang Wang, Qi Wang, Peter Búš, Moquan Cheng

Silenced Biases: The Dark Side LLMs Learned to Refuse

Rom Himelstein, Amit Levi, Brit Youngmann, Yaniv Nemcovsky, Avi Mendelson

Unintended Misalignment from Agentic Fine-Tuning: Risks and Mitigation

Dongyoon Hahm, Taywon Min, Woogyeol Jin, Kimin Lee

Resolving Predictive Multiplicity for the Rashomon Set

Parian Haghighat, Hadis Anahideh, Cynthia Rudin

Identifying Features Associated with Bias Against 93 Stigmatized Groups in Language Models and Guardrail Model Safety Mitigation

Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, Aylin Caliskan

AlignTree: Efficient Defense Against LLM Jailbreak Attacks

Gil Goren, Shahar Katz, Lior Wolf

Beyond Transcription: Mechanistic Interpretability in ASR

Neta Glazer, Yael Segal-Feldman, Hilit Segev, Aviv Shamsian, Asaf Buchnick

EssayBench: Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Genre Chinese Essay Writing

Fan Gao, Dongyuan Li, Ding Xia, Fei Mi, Yasheng Wang

SMiLE: Provably Enforcing Global Relational Properties in Neural Networks

Matteo Francobaldi, Michele Lombardi, Andrea Lodi

The Alignment Game: A Theory of Long-Horizon Alignment Through Recursive Curation

Ali Falahati, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Kate Larson, Lukasz Golab

Aligning Attention with Human Rationales for Self-Explaining Hate Speech Detection

Brage Eilertsen, Røskva Bjørgfinsdóttir, Francielle Vargas, Ali Ramezani-Kebrya

ACID Test: A Benchmark for Cultural Safety and Alignment in LALMs

Bikash Dutta, Adit Jain, Rishabh Ranjan, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

Democratizing Diplomacy: A Harness for Evaluating Any Large Language Model on Full-Press Diplomacy

Alexander Duffy, Samuel J Paech, Ishana Shastri, Elizabeth Karpinski, Baptiste Alloui-Cros

AMaPO: Adaptive Margin-attached Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment

Ruibo Deng, Duanyu Feng, Wenqiang Lei

Resilience in Ambient Multi-Agent LLMs via Decentralized Bio-Autonomic Control and Immune-Inspired Anomaly Detection

Nastaran Darabi, Devashri Naik, Sina Tayebati, Dinithi Jayasuriya, Amit Ranjan Trivedi

A Multi-Agent Conversational Bandit Approach to Online Evaluation and Selection of User-Aligned LLM Responses

Xiangxiang Dai, Yuejin Xie, Maoli Liu, Xuchuang Wang, Zhuohua Li

TWINFUZZ: Dual-Model Fuzzing for Robustness Generalization in Deep Learning

Enze Dai, Wentao Mo, Kun Hu, Xiaogang Zhu, Xi Xiao

MegaCoin: Enhancing Medium-Grained Color Perception for Vision-Language Models

Ming-Chang Chiu, Shicheng Wen, Pin-Yu Chen, Xuezhe Ma

Deep Hidden Cognition Facilitates Reliable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Zijun Chen, Wenbo Hu, Richang Hong

Preference Optimization via Contrastive Divergence: Your Policy Is Secretly an NLL Estimator

Zhuotong Chen, Fang Liu, Xuan Zhu, Haozhu Wang, Jiayu Li

On the Exponential Convergence for Offline RLHF with Pairwise Comparisons

Zhirui Chen, Vincent Y. F. Tan

MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs

Boyuan Chen, Minghao Shao, Abdul Basit, Siddharth Garg, Muhammad Shafique

A Course Correction in Steerability Evaluation: Revealing Miscalibration and Side Effects in LLMs

Trenton Chang, Tobias Schnabel, Adith Swaminathan, Jenna Wiens

ALPHA: Action-Based Learning for Pluralistic Human Alignment in Large Language Models

Aanisha Bhattacharyya, Susmit Agrawal, Yaman Kumar Singla, Tarun Ram Menta, Nikitha SR

DNR Bench: Benchmarking Over-Reasoning in Reasoning LLMs

Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Masoud Hashemi, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Jishnu Sethumadhavan Nair, Aman Tiwari

MoralReason: Generalizable Moral Decision Alignment for LLM Agents Using Reasoning-Level Reinforcement Learning

Zhiyu An, Wan Du

Operationalizing Pluralistic Values in Large Language Model Alignment Reveals Trade-offs in Safety, Inclusivity, and Model Behavior

Dalia Ali, Dora Zhao, Allison Koenecke, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos

Beyond Patches: Mining Interpretable Part-Prototypes for Explainable AI

Mahdi Alehdaghi, Rajarshi Bhattacharya, Pourya Shamsolmoali, Rafael M. O. Cruz, Eric Granger

AURA: Affordance-Understanding and Risk-aware Alignment Technique for Large Language Models

Sayantan Adak, Pratyush Chatterjee, Somnath Banerjee, Rima Hazra, Somak Aditya

FPT Approximation Algorithms for TSP on Non-Metric Graphs

Jingyang Zhao, Zimo Sheng, Mingyu Xiao

Superior Runtime Guarantees for the MOEA/D Multi-Objective Optimizer via Weighted-Sum Decomposition

Danyang Zhang, Zerong Zhong, Weijie Zheng, Benjamin Doerr

Instance Generation for Meta-Black-Box Optimization Through Latent Space Reverse Engineering

Chen Wang, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zhiguang Cao, Zeyuan Ma

Deeper Treatment of the Bi-objective Search Framework

Shawn Skyler, Dor Atzmon, Ariel Felner, Oren Salzman, Carlos Hernandez Ulloa

Bidirectional Bounded-Suboptimal Heuristic Search with Consistent Heuristics

Shahaf S. Shperberg, Natalie Morad, Lior Siag, Ariel Felner, Dor Atzmon

Not Just for Archiving: Provable Benefits of Reusing the Archive in Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization

Shengjie Ren, Zimin Liang, Miqing Li, Chao Qian

Breadth-First Search vs. Restarting Random Walks for Escaping Uninformed Heuristic Regions

Daniel Platnick, Dawson Tomasz, Eamon Earl, Sourena Khanzadeh, Richard Valenzano

Multiple-Interval Coverage for Resource Management of Passive Surveillance Systems

Jan Pikman, Premysl Sucha, Claire Hanen, Zdenek Hanzalek

Towards a Rigorous Understanding of the Population Dynamics of the NSGA-III: Tight Runtime Bounds

Andre Opris

Exact Combinatorial Multi-Class Graph Cuts for Semi-Supervised Learning

Mohammad Mahdi Omati, Yasin Salajeghe, Mahshad Moradi, Arash Amini

Ordinal Secretaries with Advice

Hasti Nourmohammadi, Ying Cao, Bo Sun, Xiaoqi Tan

Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Lehmer Codes to Search Permutation Spaces with Evolutionary Algorithms

Yuxuan Ma, Valentino Santucci, Carsten Witt

EoH-S: Evolution of Heuristic Set Using LLMs for Automated Heuristic Design

Fei Liu, Yilu Liu, Qingfu Zhang, Tong Xialiang, Mingxuan Yuan

CRAF: A Clinical Reasoning-Adaptive Framework via Reinforcement Learning for Similar Case Retrieval

Jie Lin, Lei Jiang, Zongyi Chen, Liansheng Wang

Random is Faster than Systematic in Multi-Objective Local Search

Zimin Liang, Miqing Li

Efficient Few-Step Solution Generation via Discrete Flow Matching for Combinatorial Optimization

Yuanshu Li, Di Wang, Wei Du, Xuan Wu, Peng Zhao

Post-Hoc Refinement for Multitask Symbolic Regression via Consensus-Accelerated Shapley Analysis

Xinyue Li, Wang Hu, Yu Zhang

A Solution Space Transformation-Guided Co-Evolution for Energy-Saving Distributed Heterogeneous Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Tao Li, Xingchen Li, Haoyue Ma, Zhi-Hui Zhan

Nested Depth Search

Junkang Li, Tristan Cazenave, Swann Legras, Arthur Queffelec, Véronique Ventos

Priority-Based Graph-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Robust Analog Circuit Optimization

Jintao Li, Zhenxin Chen, Sicheng He, Ao-Jin Li, Shui Yu

LAMDA: Two-Phase HPO via Learning Prior from Low-Fidelity Data

Fan Li, Shengbo Wang, Ke Li

Finding One Local Optimum Is Easy—but What About Two?

Yasuaki Kobayashi, Kazuhiro Kurita, Yutaro Yamaguchi

MOTIF: Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework

Nguyen Viet Tuan Kiet, Tung Dao, Cong Dao Tran, Huynh Thi Thanh Binh

EvoGrad: Evolutionary-Weighted Gradient and Hessian Learning for Black-Box Optimization

Yedidya Kfir, Elad Sarafian, Yoram Louzoun, Sarit Kraus

Approximation Algorithm for Constrained k-Center Clustering: A Local Search Approach

Chaoqi Jia, Longkun Guo, Kewen Liao, Zhigang Lu, Chao Chen

USPR: Learning a Unified Solver for Profiled Routing

Chuanbo Hua, Federico Berto, Zhikai Zhao, Jiwoo Son, Changhyun Kwon

Pareto-Grid-Guided Large Language Models for Fast and High-Quality Heuristics Design in Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization

Ha Minh Hieu, Hung Phan, Tung Duy Doan, Tung Dao, Cong Dao Tran

Beyond Single-Step Updates: Reinforcement Learning of Heuristics with Limited-Horizon Search

Gal Hadar, Forest Agostinelli, Shahaf S. Shperberg

Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair k-Center Clustering

Longkun Guo, Zeyu Lin, Chaoqi Jia, Chao Chen