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Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a crucial task for achieving fine-grained visual understanding, matching objects within images (visual mentions) to entities in a knowledge base. Previous VEL tasks rely on textual inputs, but writing queries for complex scenes can be challenging. Visual inputs like clicks or bounding boxes offer a more convenient alternative. Therefore, we propose a new task, Pixel-Level Visual Entity Linking (PL-VEL), which uses pixel masks from visual inputs to refer to objects, complementing previous textual methods for VEL. To facilitate research on this task, we have constructed the MaskOven-Wiki dataset through an entirely automatic reverse region-entity annotation framework. This dataset contains more than 5 million annotations. As far as we know, this dataset is the first multimodal dataset that aligns pixel-level regions with entity-level labels, which will advance visual understanding towards fine-grained. Moreover, as pixel masks correspond to semantic regions in an image, we enhance previous patch-interacted attention with region-interacted attention by a visual semantic tokenization approach. Manual evaluation results indicate that the reverse annotation framework achieved a 94.8% annotation success rate. Experimental results show that models trained on this dataset improved accuracy by 18 points compared to zero-shot models. Additionally, the semantic tokenization method demonstrated a 5-point accuracy improvement over the trained baseline. The MaskOven-Wiki dataset will be available at https://github.com/xxx/xxx.

AAAI 2025

Reverse Region-to-Entity Annotation for Pixel-Level Visual Entity Linking

completio

linked open data knowledge graphs

dmkm

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

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-25 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.



Split Federated Learning (SFL) splits and collaboratively trains a shared model between clients and server, where clients transmit activations and client-side models to server for updates. Recent SFL studies assume synchronous transmission of activations and client-side models from clients to server. However, due to significant variations in computational and communication capabilities among clients, activations and client-side models arrive at server asynchronously. The delay caused by asynchrony significantly degrades the performance of SFL. To address this issue, we consider an asynchronous SFL framework, where an activation buffer and a model buffer are embedded on the server to manage the asynchronously transmitted activations and client-side models, respectively. Furthermore, as asynchronous activation transmissions cause the buffer to frequently receive activations from resource-rich clients, leading to biased updates of the server-side model, we propose Generative activations-aided Asynchronous SFL (GAS). In GAS, the server maintains an activation distribution for each label based on received activations and generates activations from these distributions according to the degree of bias. These generative activations are then used to assist in updating the server-side model, ensuring more accurate updates. We derive a tighter convergence bound, and our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

GAS: Generative Activation-Aided Asynchronous Split Federated Learning

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) mainly enhance their performance by improving the image resolution, which not only adds to the already high computational overhead, but also significantly increases the number of redundant tokens.Traditional pruning methods typically focus on foreground elements, making them unsuitable for MLLMs where some questions also involve background context.To address this challenge, in this paper, we introduce OncePrune, an innovative, training-free approach for adaptive visual token pruning in MLLMs. This method strategically eliminates redundant tokens by framing the pruning process as a connected component. The aim is to identify and retain the most significant token for each visual element, whether located in the foreground or background.In practice, OncePrune constructs an adjacency matrix from visual token similarities, and obtains the most significant tokens for each component by iterating the potential information flow.To validate OncePrune, we apply it to a set of commonly used MLLMs, including LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of vision-language benchmarks.The experiment results demonstrate that OncePrune significantly reduces computation overhead, especially in the fine-grained tasks. For instance, OncePrune reduces 63.57% FLOPs on LLaVA-NeXT for TextVQA with only 2% accuracy drop. Our code is provided in the appendix.

What kind of visual tokens do we need? Training-free Visual Token Pruning for Multi-modal Large Language Models from the Perspective of Graph

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts exhibit recognition errors and various spoken language phenomena such as disfluencies, ungrammatical sentences, and incomplete sentences, hence suffering from poor readability. To improve readability, we propose a Contextualized Spoken-to-Written conversion (CoS2W) task to address ASR and grammar errors and also transfer the informal text into the formal style with content preserved, utilizing contexts and auxiliary information. This task naturally matches the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate comprehensive comparisons of various LLMs, we construct a document-level Spoken-to-Written conversion of ASR Transcripts Benchmark (SWAB) dataset. Using SWAB, we study the impact of different granularity levels on the CoS2W performance, and propose methods to exploit contexts and auxiliary information to enhance the outputs. Experimental results reveal that LLMs have the potential to excel in the CoS2W task, particularly in grammaticality and formality, our methods achieve effective understanding of contexts and auxiliary information by LLMs. We further investigate the effectiveness of using LLMs as evaluators and find that LLM evaluators show strong correlations with human evaluations on rankings of faithfulness and formality, which validates the reliability of LLM evaluators for the CoS2W task.

Recording for Eyes, Not Echoing to Ears: Contextualized Spoken-to-Written Conversion of ASR Transcripts

We initiate the study of computing envy-free allocations of indivisible items in the extension setting, i.e., when some part of the allocation is fixed and the task is to allocate the remaining items. In view of the NP-hardness of the problem, we investigate whether - and under which conditions - one can obtain fixed-parameter algorithms for computing a solution in settings where most of the allocation is already fixed. Our results provide a broad complexity-theoretic classification of the problem which includes: (a) fixed-parameter algorithms tailored to settings with few distinct types of agents or items; (b) lower bounds which exclude the generalization of these positive results to more general settings. We conclude by showing that - unlike when computing allocations from scratch - the non-algorithmic question of whether more relaxed EF1 or EFX allocations exist can be completely resolved in the extension setting.

The Complexity of Extending Fair Allocations of Indivisible Goods

Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) has shown promising performance on various expensive multi-objective optimization problems (EMOPs). However, effectively modeling complex distributions of the Pareto optimal solutions is difficult with limited function evaluations. Existing Pareto set learning algorithms may exhibit considerable instability in such expensive scenarios, leading to significant deviations between the obtained solution set and the Pareto set (PS). In this paper, we propose a novel Composite Diffusion Model based Pareto Set Learning algorithm, namely CDM-PSL, for expensive MOBO. CDM-PSL includes both unconditional and conditional diffusion model for generating high-quality samples efficiently. Besides, we introduce a weighting method based on information entropy to balance different objectives. This method is integrated with the guiding strategy, ensuring that all the objectives are appropriately balanced and given due consideration during the optimization process. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world problems demonstrates that CDM-PSL attains superior performance compared with various state-of-the-art MOBO algorithms.

Expensive Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization Based on Diffusion Models

Graph similarity computation (GSC) is to calculate the similarity between one pair of graphs, which is a fundamental problem with fruitful applications in the graph community. In GSC, graph edit distance (GED) and maximum common subgraph (MCS) are the two most adopted similarity metrics, both of which are NP-hard to compute. Instead of calculating the exact values, state-of-the-art solutions resort to leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn data-driven models for the estimation of GED and MCS. Most of them are built on components involving node-level interactions crossing graphs, which engender vast computation overhead but are of little avail in effectiveness. Motivated by this, in the paper, we present GraSP, a simple yet effective GSC approach for GED and MCS prediction. More concretely, GraSP achieves high result efficacy through several key instruments: enhanced node features via positional encoding and a GNN model augmented by a gating mechanism, residual connections, as well as multi-scale pooling. Theoretically, GraSP can surpass the 1-WL test, indicating its high expressiveness. Empirically, extensive experiments comparing GraSP against 10 competitors on multiple widely adopted benchmark datasets showcase the superiority of GraSP over prior arts in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GraSP-2024.

GraSP: Simple yet Effective Graph Similarity Predictions

Following natural instructions is crucial for the effective application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), research on assessing and improving instruction-following (IF) alignment within the RAG domain remains limited. To address this issue, we propose VIF-RAG, the first automated, scalable, and verifiable synthetic pipeline for instruction-following alignment in RAG systems. We start by manually crafting a minimal set of atomic instructions ($<$100) and developing combination rules to synthesize and verify complex instructions for a seed set. We then use supervised models for instruction rewriting while simultaneously generating code to automate the verification of instruction quality via a Python executor. Finally, we integrate these instructions with extensive RAG and general data samples, scaling up to a high-quality VIF-RAG-QA dataset ($>$100k) through automated processes. To address the gap in instruction-following auto-evaluation for RAG systems, we introduce FollowRAG Benchmark, which includes approximately 3K test samples, covering 22 categories of general instruction constraints and 4 knowledge-intensive QA datasets. Due to its robust pipeline design, FollowRAG can seamlessly integrate with different RAG benchmarks. Using FollowRAG and 8 widely-used IF and foundational abilities benchmarks for LLMs, we demonstrate that VIF-RAG markedly enhances LLM performance across a broad range of general instruction constraints while effectively leveraging its capabilities in RAG scenarios. Further analysis offers practical insights for achieving IF alignment in RAG systems.

Toward Verifiable Instruction-Following Alignment for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Dense video captioning (DVC) aims to describe multiple events within a video, and its performance is greatly affected by the accuracy of video event detection. Video event detection involves predicting the proposal boundaries (start and end times) and the classification score of each event in a video. Recently, a few methods have applied diffusion models originally designed for image object detection to detect events in DVC. These methods add noise to the ground-truth event proposal boundaries, and subsequently learn the denoising process. However, these methods often overlook the fundamental differences between videos and images. We observe that, whereas in images the important information for object classification is normally around the boundaries of the ground truth boxes, in videos the key information for event classification is typically centered in the middle of ground-truth event proposals. As a result, the classification module in these existing diffusion models becomes insensitive to boundary changes introduced by the added noise, leading to sub-optimal performance. This paper introduces DiffDVC, an innovative diffusion model for DVC. The core of DiffDVC is a boundary-sensitive detector. The detector increases the sensitivity of the classification module to boundary changes by focusing on frames within a specific range around the start and end times of noisy event proposals. Additionally, this range is dynamically adjusted to suit different event proposals. Comprehensive experiments on ActivityNet-1.3, ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets show DiffDVC achieving superior performance.

DiffDVC: Accurate Event Detection for Dense Video Captioning via Diffusion Models

The ability of zero-shot translation emerges when we train a multilingual model with certain translation directions; the model can then directly translate in unseen directions. Alternatively, zero-shot translation can be accomplished by pivoting through a third language (e.g., English). In our work, we observe that both direct and pivot translations are noisy and achieve less satisfactory performance. We propose EBBS, an ensemble method with a novel bi-level beam search algorithm, where each ensemble component explores its own prediction step by step at the lower level but all components are synchronized by a "soft voting" mechanism at the upper level. Results on two popular multilingual translation datasets show that EBBS consistently outperforms direct and pivot translations, as well as existing ensemble techniques. Further, we can distill the ensemble's knowledge back to the multilingual model to improve inference efficiency; profoundly, our EBBS-distilled model can even outperform EBBS as it learns from the ensemble knowledge.

EBBS: An Ensemble with Bi-Level Beam Search for Zero-Shot Machine Translation

Meta-learning, or "learning to learn," aims to enable models to quickly adapt to new tasks with minimal data. While traditional methods like Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) optimize parameters in Euclidean space, they often struggle to capture complex learning dynamics, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Stiefel-MAML, which integrates Riemannian geometry by optimizing within the Stiefel manifold, a space that naturally enforces orthogonality constraints. By leveraging the geometric structure of the Stiefel manifold, we improve parameter expressiveness and enable more efficient optimization through Riemannian gradient calculations and retraction operations. We also introduce a novel kernel-based loss function defined on the Stiefel manifold, further enhancing the model’s ability to explore the parameter space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets—including Omniglot, Mini-ImageNet, FC-100, and CUB—demonstrate that Stiefel-MAML consistently outperforms traditional MAML, achieving superior performance across various few-shot learning tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of Riemannian geometry to enhance meta-learning, paving the way for future research on optimizing over different geometric structures.

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