Despite extensive research, computational creativity still lacks a conceptually grounded, practically relevant, and empirically applicable formal definition across contexts such as art, scientific research, and games. Existing approaches to creativity often focus on proposing informal conceptual definitions without providing formal computational concepts. Alternatively, they propose formal definitions without carefully examining their underlying assumptions or providing validation of these definitions by testing their performance in specific application settings. To address these problems, this paper proposes several formal postulates of creativity grounded in prior psychological work on creativity, especially as related to Boden’s three core criteria of creativity: newness, value, and surprise. Furthermore, we propose a conceptual mathematical definition of creativity that aligns with these postulates. We also validate our proposed creativity formula in two applications: determining the creativity of particular chess moves, and assessing the creativity of paintings by some artists, such as Picasso, Renoir, and other painters. Experimental results demonstrate that our formula of creativity successfully captures creative patterns across both the chess and the art domains. This suggests that creativity can be effectively characterized through a unified mathematical structure based on three fundamental criteria, namely newness, value, and surprise, whose specific measurements are adapted to the particular domains.
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For minimally rigid graphs, the same edge-length data can admit multiple realizations (up to translations and rotations). Finding graphs with exceptionally many realizations is an extremal problem in rigidity theory, but exhaustive search quickly becomes infeasible due to the super-exponential growth of the number of candidate graphs and the high cost of realization-count evaluation. We propose a reinforcement-learning approach that constructs minimally rigid graphs via 0- and 1-extensions, also known as Henneberg moves. We optimize realization-count invariants using the Deep Cross-Entropy Method with a policy parameterized by a Graph Isomorphism Network encoder and a permutation-equivariant extension-level action head. Empirically, our method matches the known optima for planar realization counts and improves the best known bounds for spherical realization counts, yielding new record graphs.
Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) demands models that can effectively capture complex temporal patterns across multiple scales while remaining computationally efficient. However, existing approaches generally struggle to reconcile fine-grained representation learning, especially under class imbalance and real-world constraints. In this paper, we present FreSH, a Frequency-Segmented Hierarchical Multi-Expert Framework designed to address these challenges. FreSH introduces a new perspective for MTSC by enabling adaptive, multi-scale analysis of temporal signals, allowing different aspects of the data to be modeled in a complementary and coordinated manner. By combining localized specialization with holistic context modeling, FreSH achieves strong representational capacity without incurring excessive computational overhead. An adaptive fusion strategy further enhances flexibility, enabling the model to dynamically emphasize the most informative components of the input. In addition, we incorporate a more robust optimization objective that improves learning stability across varying sample difficulties and class distributions. Extensive evaluations on 30 UEA benchmark datasets and real-world vibration data demonstrate that FreSH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classification accuracy, while substantially reducing model size and efficiency. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/Wangmy2120/FreSH00.
Short video harmful content detection aims to automatically identify diverse anomalies from user-generated media. This task presents unique challenges due to frequent editing cuts and highly variable anomaly densities, limiting the effectiveness of traditional surveillance-based approaches. Moreover, existing Vision-Language Model-based approaches typically rely on rigid instance selection mechanisms that fail to adapt to the unpredictable duration of anomalies in such unconstrained videos. To address these issues, we propose SVLA, a Shot-conditioned Vision-Language Adaptation framework, for effectively detecting harmful contents from online short videos. Our approach introduces a novel π-adaptive strategy to dynamically estimate shot-level anomaly density, replacing rigid selection with calibrated supervision. Furthermore, we employ a shot-conditioned temporal encoder to respect video hierarchy and adopt a dual-path contextual adapter to resolve semantic ambiguity. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset (SVA) covering more genuine online short videos that involve seven anomaly categories. Experiments on the SVA dataset demonstrate that SVLA can achieve the state-of-the-art performance and outperform its competitors across diverse scenarios. Codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/xushuai7/IJCAI-SVLA.
Model counting of Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) formulas is a critical problem in applications such as probabilistic inference and network reliability. For example, it is often used for query evaluation in probabilistic databases. Due to the computational intractability of exact DNF counting, there has been a line of research into a variety of approximation algorithms. We develop a new Monte Carlo approach with an adaptive stopping rule and short-circuit formula evaluation. We prove it achieves Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning bounds and has asymptotically improved time and randomness complexity compared to previous methods. We also show experimentally that it out-performs prior algorithms by at least three orders of magnitude in running time and scalability.
We study multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), a setting in which an agent learns a single, universal policy capable of generalising to arbitrary, possibly unseen tasks. We consider tasks specified as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae, which are commonly used in formal methods to specify properties of systems, and have recently been successfully adopted in RL. In this setting, we present a novel task embedding technique leveraging a new generation of semantic LTL-to-automata translations, originally developed for temporal synthesis. The resulting semantically labelled automata contain rich, structured information in each state that allow us to (i) compute the automaton efficiently on-the-fly, (ii) extract expressive task embeddings used to condition the policy, and (iii) naturally support full LTL. Experimental results in a variety of domains demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to scale to complex specifications where existing methods fail.
Continual knowledge graph embedding (CKGE) has gained popularity for managing dynamic knowledge graphs. Unlike general graph continual-learning approaches, CKGE focuses on retaining triple-level knowledge, thereby overcoming the inability of static models to accommodate continuously arriving facts. However, as new fact triples come in, real-world knowledge graphs often experience structural distribution shifts: the underlying topology and the way facts interconnect evolve over time. This presents a challenge that the structural distribution of historical data may diverge from that of emerging data, creating a distributional mismatch that complicates the adaptation to new trends. To address this, we propose Pattern-Anchor Alignment (PAAL), which introduces relation-level structural anchors to explicitly model these structural shifts. By quantifying the alignment between the structural distribution of emerging triples and historical anchors, PAAL implements an alignment-modulated optimization strategy. It utilizes a calibrated gating mechanism to precisely regulate the intensity of historical constraints based on structural stability. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of PAAL, showing average H@1 improvements of 11.77% and 9.29% on pattern-shift and standard CKGE benchmarks, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/cangjie553/PAAL.
Network Traffic Anomaly Detection (NTAD), particularly under zero-positive settings, is a critical task in cybersecurity. Existing zero-positive NTAD approaches primarily rely on reconstruction-based pipelines. Nevertheless, these methods are susceptible to an identical shortcut issue, where models indiscriminately reconstruct both normal and anomalous inputs, leading to anomaly overgeneralization. To address this limitation, we propose BiPred, the first prediction-based detection paradigm for NTAD. BiPred symmetrically divides each network traffic sample into two segments and reformulates the NTAD task as a bidirectional prediction across these two segments. Unlike reconstruction-based methods, our BiPred not only eliminates shortcut learning by design but also establishes explicit bidirectional contextual dependencies, making it more sensitive to anomalous traffic. Moreover, we develop a novel Residual Scanning Mamba block that encodes multi-view contextual information to support bidirectional prediction. A residual fusion mechanism is proposed for the multi-view scanning Mamba to suppress the accumulation of inter-view redundancy. This design prevents representation degradation and provides multi-view contextual details for prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our BiPred paradigm, highlighting a new research direction for NTAD. Code is available at https://github.com/ikun0124/BiPred.
Virtual Knowledge Graphs (VKGs) provide an effective solution for data integration by mapping heterogeneous data sources to a unified ontology. However, existing VKG construction frameworks primarily focus on one-shot construction, which often results in partial data coverage and support for only initial information needs. After the VKG has been deployed, new information needs will inevitably arise over time. Therefore, enriching VKGs to support evolving information needs remains an expert-intensive iterative task. In this work, we formulate the task of Information-Needs-Guided VKG Enrichment (IN-VKGE), and propose an iterative framework that leverages large language models to assess whether information needs can be supported using SPARQL execution feedback and generate ontology and mapping enrichment proposals. Experiments on two real-world VKGs show that our approach outperforms existing paradigms, and produces enrichment proposals that receive high expert ratings for effectively resolving the identified information needs.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training environments. To boost agents' in-context RL (ICRL) ability, this work formulates ICRL as a two-agent emergent communication problem and introduces CORAL (Communicative Representation for Adaptive RL), a framework that learns a transferable communicative context by functionally separating latent representation learning from control. In CORAL, an Information Agent (IA) is pre-trained as a world model on a diverse distribution of tasks. Its objective is not direct return maximization, but world modeling and distilling its understanding into concise messages. The emergent communication protocol is shaped by a novel Causal Influence Loss, which measures the effect that the message has on the next action. During deployment, the previously trained IA serves as a fixed contextualizer for a new Control Agent (CA), which learns to solve tasks by interpreting the provided communicative context. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables the CA to achieve significant gains in sample efficiency and successfully perform zero-shot adaptation with the help of pre-trained IA in diverse online and offline environments, validating the efficacy of learning a transferable communicative representation.
Despite recent advances in training-free text-guided image editing using pretrained rectified flow models, achieving a balance between text adherence and background preservation remains a challenge. Existing methods typically treat image editing as an open-loop trajectory generation task, adopting either an inversion-based or inversion-free paradigm. However, neither can perfectly achieve this goal. Specifically, inversion-based approaches accumulate inversion errors without feedback, whereas inversion-free methods exhibit unstable trajectories due to the lack of constraints. To address this, we propose EKFEdit, a novel framework that formulates image editing as a sequential state estimation problem in a nonlinear dynamic system, which models inversion-free editing trajectories as the system’s prior dynamics and leverages an Extended Kalman Filter to adaptively fuse observations from external editing algorithms. EKFEdit enables adaptive trajectory correction, effectively combining the complementary strengths of the different paradigms. We instantiate this framework into two concrete approaches (EKFEdit-RF and EKFEdit-DNA) via different observation methods, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approaches achieve new state-of-the-art performance compared to previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/baiyeweiguang/EKFEdit.
Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DyGNNs) are facing challenges with distribution shifts between training and test data that are similar but not identical. Existing DyGNNs for out-of-distribution scenarios primarily focus on discovering invariant patterns in the spatial domain, overlooking its impact on the structural properties in the spectral domain. In this paper, we propose a spectral-based graph augmentation framework designed to investigate and improve generalization behavior in dynamic graphs under distribution shifts. Specifically, we augment the input graph spectra into a mixture of shift components by maximizing the variance of spectral distance and propose an efficient approximation to reduce the computational cost brought by eigen-decomposition. Building on this, we develop a multi-encoder architecture in which each encoder targets a specific spectral shift component to generate referential representations. Our method adopts a new learning objective to encourage the model to rely on robust spectral properties for better generalization under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in node classification and link prediction tasks. Source codes are available at https://github.com/SSQiana/DSPA.
We present complementary branching, a new branching approach for model counting based on the complement counting paradigm. Instead of branching on individual variables, complementary branching decomposes the counting problem for arbitrary CNF formulas into several subformulas, which naturally augments the classic DPLL branching. We show two novel results in which the main tool is complementary branching. First, we design new #SAT algorithms for sparse CNF formulas running in time O*(2^(alpha n)), for some constant alpha < 1. As a second application, we improve the best known deterministic upper bound for #3-SAT to O*(1.637^n) by using a version of clause learning based on complementary branching. These results demonstrate that complementary branching is a powerful tool for designing faster exact algorithms for propositional model counting.
In this work, we propose a diffusion-based method for 3D-aware image composition. Previous approaches have focused on 2D-view image composition, which limits their handling of complex 3D spatial relationships. Consequently, they are not well-suited for applications requiring precise 3D object control and iterative refinement, including interior design visualization, visual effects prototyping, and virtual reality scene construction. In contrast, our method extracts 3D bounding boxes for all objects in the scene image. Users can then specify a new 3D bounding box based on existing spatial context and provide an image of the target object. Leveraging a fine-tuned diffusion model, our approach enables high-fidelity image composition while preserving the underlying 3D structure of the scene.
Industrial automation in smart logistics and factories requires simulation platforms that support rapid environment building before costly physical deployment. Yet existing tools often require substantial expertise, complex setup, and long configuration times, hindering agile prototyping. We present RAPID, a simulation platform with two components: layout design, which enables intuitive visual configuration of factory layouts, and behavior simulation and validation, which allows users to attach behavior models and evaluate system performance. RAPID lowers the entry barrier to industrial simulation, letting users apply existing behavior models or trained reinforcement learning (RL) agents to new layouts with minimal effort. This approach lets practitioners prototype facilities in minutes rather than weeks and gives researchers a standardized environment for benchmarking multi-agent RL and coordination algorithms. By combining rapid design with simulation-based validation, RAPID accelerates automation development from concept to implementation.
Adversarial training is an effective technique for enhancing the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs). Prior research shows that misclassified examples influence final adversarial robustness much more than correctly classified examples. Ignoring this difference during training can hurt model performance. In crowdsourcing, varying annotator expertise causes noisy, inconsistent labels. As a result, it is hard to distinguish misclassified and correctly classified examples using only provided annotations. Thus, how to use the reliability and discrepancy between these example types to improve robustness within adversarial learning remains a critical but underexplored issue. In this work, we first explore how misclassified and correctly classified examples affect learning from crowds (LFC) in adversarial environments. Then, we formulate the problem of misclassification-aware robust learning from multiple human labelers as a bilevel min-max problem. After that, we introduce MALC, a new approach to make classifiers more robust to adversarial examples via iterative adversarial example generation and parameter estimation. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the proposed MALC, showing that MALC can outperform the state-of-the-art LFC methods in both white-box and black-box settings.
Efficient Contextual Bandit Learning via Reward-Space Sampling and Online Optimization (Student Abstract)
PDF ↗The contextual multi-armed bandit problem underlies applications in recommendations, e-commerce, finance, and healthcare, where balancing exploration and exploitation is critical. While algorithms such as Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and Thompson Sampling (TS) achieve strong theoretical guarantees, they often incur heavy computational cost from high-dimensional parameter estimation. We propose a new approach that combines reward sampling with online stochastic optimization. At each round, the algorithm samples hypothetical rewards for all actions and selects the action with the largest draw; the observed reward then updates the model via stochastic optimization. This design is both simple and efficient, preserving exploration while avoiding the pitfalls of greedy behavior on near-duplicate arms. Across synthetic and real-world datasets, our method attains near-optimal reward more quickly and with substantially lower computation than TS and UCB, demonstrating that sampling directly in reward space can improve both statistical efficiency and scalability.
We introduce a single–backbone foundation model for brain MRI that supports dynamic modality integration: it operates with arbitrary, possibly unseen, combinations of MRI sequences at pretrain and transfer. The encoder is conditioned by text-derived modality embeddings via conditional layer normalization, while a variance–covariance penalty discourages feature collapse. Unlike expert-based designs that grow with each new sequence, our approach scales without adding modality-specific branches. Pretrained self-supervised on ∼60,000 heterogeneous MRIs, the model learns modality-aware yet modality-agnostic features. We outline evaluation on segmentation and classification under missing/unseen modalities and cross-center shifts, and present early feasibility on multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation under limited data. This work moves toward robust, protocol-agnostic MRI foundation models suited to real clinical variability.
Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) leverages pre-collected data to adapt to new tasks. Context-based methods learn task representations from contexts. However, the context is influenced by both the task and the behavior policy. The mismatch between the behavior policy and the testing policy causes a context distribution shift problem, which results in poor task representations and degraded performance. This problem is exacerbated in settings with data limitations. To address this, we propose a novel approach called Meta-Normalizing Flow (Meta-NF). First, it employs a highly expressive and sample-efficient normalizing flow policy. Second, it incorporates a metric for testing-time task representation selection to effectively mitigate the context shift problem. Empirical results demonstrate that Meta-NF outperforms existing OMRL methods, with both components contributing to its strong performance.
Automated cancer segmentation in Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has been dominated by a paradigm of static pattern recognition, where even advanced methods leveraging Transformers, Multiple Instance Learning, or topology-aware losses remain fundamentally descriptive and correlational. To address this limitation, we reframe WSI segmentation from a descriptive task to one of causal process modeling. We introduce Topo-GraT, a novel framework featuring a Causal Growth Field (CGF) to model tumor invasion dynamics and a Causal Flow Attention (CFA) mechanism that embeds this field as an architectural prior. This causal engine is integrated within an iterative graph refinement loop that uses segmentation uncertainty to dynamically focus computational resources on the most ambiguous tissue regions. Our comprehensive experiments on multiple WSI datasets demonstrate that Topo-GraT establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods and reducing the 95% Hausdorff Distance, a key boundary metric, by over 15%. Crucially, our framework yields the CGF as a rich, interpretable output whose structure correlates with tumor aggressiveness, positioning it as a novel biomarker for downstream prognostic tasks. By shifting the paradigm from static recognition to causal reasoning, Topo-GraT offers a more robust, efficient, and clinically insightful approach, setting a new direction for the causally-aware medical image analysis.