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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models (LMs) with human values by training reward models (RMs) on binary preferences and using these RMs to fine-tune the base models. Despite its importance, the internal mechanisms of RLHF remain poorly understood. This paper introduces new metrics to evaluate RM effectiveness, focusing on feature imprint, feature resistance, and feature robustness. We categorize alignment datasets into target features (desired values) and spoiler features (undesired concepts). By regressing RM scores against these features, we quantify the extent to which RMs reward them -- feature imprint. We define alignment resistance as the proportion of the preference dataset where RMs fail to match human preferences, and we assess alignment robustness by analyzing RM responses to slightly perturbed texts. Our experiments, utilizing open-source components like the Anthropic/hh-rlhf preference dataset and OpenAssistant RMs, reveal significant imprints of target features and a notable sensitivity to spoiler features. We observed a 26% resistance incidence in portions of the dataset where LM labelers disagreed with human preferences. We also find that misalignment stems from confusing entries in the alignment dataset. These findings underscore the importance of scrutinizing both RMs and alignment datasets for a deeper understanding of value alignment.

AAAI 2025

SEAL: Systematic Error Analysis for Value ALignment

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

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.



The metro flow in Urban Rail Transit Systems (URTS) differs from other urban traffic flows because it is characterized by: (1) highly predetermined scheduling; and (2) interactively dynamic dependencies over the fixed physical infrastructure that vary with spatiotemporal and environmental factors. Notwithstanding the advances in graph neural networks, existing efforts fail to fully capture the characteristics and complex spatiotemporal dynamics specific to metro flow, as the innate graph-aware interactions underlying a metro flow are frequently affected by an amalgamation of: intrinsic connectivity, environmental associations, and flow-activated correlation, which usually dynamically evolve over time while containing redundant signals. We propose $\textbf{ReDyNet}$, a novel $\textbf{Re}$sponsive $\textbf{Dy}$namic Graph Neural $\textbf{Net}$work to accurately understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of metro flow and external factors. Specifically, it employs a responsive mechanism that adapts to variations in metro flow and external influences, ensuring the construction of an appropriate dynamic graph. In addition, ReDyNet follows the merits of information bottleneck (IB) theory with redundancy disentanglement to enhance the clarity and precision of contextual spatial signals. Our experiments conducted on three real-world metro passenger flow datasets demonstrate that the proposed ReDyNet outperforms several representative baselines.

Responsive Dynamic Graph Disentanglement for Metro Flow Forecasting

This paper presents fast and exact methods for computing the probability of acceptance of an argument using Dung's semantics in the Constellation paradigm of Abstract Argumentation. 
For (directed) Singly-Connected Graphs (SCGs), the problem can now be solved in linearithmic time instead of being exponential in the number of attacks, as reported in the literature.  
Moreover, in the more general case of (directed) Acyclic Graphs (AGs), we provide an algorithm whose time complexity is linearithmic in the product of the out-degree of dependent arguments, i.e., arguments reaching the argument considered for acceptance through multiple paths in the graph. 
We theoretically show that this complexity is lower than the lower-bound of the (exact) Constellation method, which is also supported by empirical results. 
We also compare our approach on AGs with the (approximate) Monte-Carlo method, which is stopped when our approach obtains the exact results. Within this time constraint, Monte-Carlo still outputs significant errors, underlying the fast computation of our approach.

Fast Computing of Dung Semantics in Acyclic Probabilistic Argumentation Frameworks

The increasing parameters and expansive dataset of large lan- guage models (LLMs) highlight the urgent demand for a technical solution to audit the underlying privacy risks and copyright issues associated with LLMs. Existing studies have partially addressed this need through an exploration of the pre-training data detection problem, which is an instance of a membership inference attack (MIA). This problem involves determining whether a given piece of text has been used during the pre-training phase of the target LLM. Although existing methods have designed various sophisticated MIA score functions to achieve considerable detection performance in pre-trained LLMs, how to achieve high-confidence detection and how to perform MIA on aligned LLMs remain challenging. In this paper, we propose MIA-Tuner, a novel instruction-based MIA method, which instructs LLMs themselves to serve as a more precise pre-training data detector internally, rather than design an external MIA score function. Furthermore, we design two instruction-based safeguards to respectively mitigate the privacy risks brought by the existing methods and MIA-Tuner. To comprehensively evaluate the most recent state-of-the-art LLMs, we collect a more up-to-date MIA benchmark dataset, named WIKIMIA-24, to replace the widely adopted benchmark WIKIMIA. We conduct extensive experiments across various aligned and unaligned LLMs over the two benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that MIA-Tuner increases the AUC of MIAs from 0.7 to a significantly high level of 0.9.

MIA-Tuner: Adapting Large Language Models as Pre-training Text Detector

With the malicious use and dissemination of multi-modal deepfake videos, researchers start to investigate multi-modal deepfake detection. Unfortunately, most of the existing methods tune all parameters with limited speech video datasets, only exploit audio-visual inconsistencies and are trained under coarse-grained consistency supervision, which hinders the generalization ability in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first multi-task audio-visual prompt learning method for multi-modal deepfake video detection, by exploiting multiple foundation models. Specifically, we construct a two-stream multi-task learning architecture and propose sequential visual prompts and short-time audio prompts to extract multi-modal features, which can be aligned at the frame level and utilized in subsequent fine-grained feature matching and fusion. Due to the natural alignment of lip movement and spoken phoneme in real data, we propose a frame-level cross-modal feature matching loss function to learn the fine-grained audio-visual consistency. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our method against the state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-modal Deepfake Detection via Multi-task Audio-Visual Prompt Learning

Graph fraud detection (GFD) has rapidly advanced in protecting online services by identifying malicious fraudsters. Recent supervised GFD research highlights that heterophilic connections between fraudster and user greatly impacts detection performance, where the fraudsters tend to camouflage themselves by building more connections to benign users. Despite their promising performance, their label reliance limits its application in unsupervised scenarios; Additionally, accurately capturing complex and diverse heterophily patterns without labels poses a further challenge. Therefore, we propose a Heterophily-guided Unsupervised Graph fraud dEtection approach (HUGE) for unsupervised GFD, which contains two essential components: a heterophily estimation module and an alignment-based fraud detection module. In the heterophily estimation module, we design a novel unsupervised heterophily metric called HALO, which captures the critical graph properties for GFD, enabling its outstanding ability to estimate heterophily with attributes. In the alignment-based fraud detection module, we develop a joint MLP-GNN architecture with ranking loss and asymmetric alignment loss. The ranking loss aligns the predicted fraud score with the relative order of HALO, providing an extra robustness guarantee by comparing heterophily between non-adjacent nodes. Moreover, the asymmetric alignment loss effectively utilizes structural information to alleviate the feature-smooth effects. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that HUGE consistently outperforms competitors, showcasing its effectiveness and robustness.

A Label-free Heterophily-guided Approach for Unsupervised Graph Fraud Detection

In decision-making problem under uncertainty, predicting unknown parameters is often considered independent of the optimization part.
Decision-focused Learning (DFL) is a task-oriented framework to integrate prediction and optimization by adapting predictive model to give better decision for the corresponding task.
Here, an inevitable challenge arises when computing gradients of the optimal decision with respect to the parameters.
Existing researches cope this issue by smoothly reforming surrogate optimization or construct surrogate loss function that mimic task loss.
However, they are applied to restricted optimization domain.
In this paper, we propose Locally Convex Global Loss Network (LCGLN), a global surrogate loss model which can be implemented in a general DFL paradigm.
LCGLN learns task loss via partial input convex neural network which is guaranteed to be convex for chosen inputs, while keeping the non-convex global structure for the other inputs.
This enables LCGLN to admit general DFL through only a single surrogate loss without any sense for choosing appropriate parametric forms.
We confirm effectiveness and flexibility of LCGLN by evaluating our proposed model with three stochastic decision-making problems.

Locally Convex Global Loss Network for Decision-Focused Learning

Recently, foundational models have significantly advanced in different tasks, accompanied by Transformer as the general backbone. However, Transformer's quadratic complexity poses challenges for handling longer sequences and higher resolution images, which may limit foundational models further development. To alleviate this issue, various efficient State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba have emerged, initially matching Transformer performance and gradually surpassing it. To improve the performance of SSMs in computer vision tasks, one crucial viewpoint is effective serialization of images. Existing vision Mambas, which rely on a linear scanning mechanism, often struggle to capture complex spatial relationships in 2D images. This results in feature loss during serialization and negatively impacts model performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose the use of fractal scanning curves for image serialization to enhance the Mambas’ ability to accurately model complex spatial dependencies. Additionally, unlike existing vision Mambas, which are designed with various curve scanning directions that increase the complexity, contradicting the original intent of Mamba to enhance model performance. We novelty introduce the Fractal Fusion Pathway (FFP) for our FractalMamba, which can enhance its performance efficiently. Extensive experiments underscore the superiority of our proposed FractalMamba.

Boosting Vision State Space Model with Fractal Scanning

Machine learning techniques are notably vulnerable to natural or adversarial perturbations, which can lead to catastrophic failures with significant economic, ethical, and societal risks. In this New Faculty Highlight Talk, I will showcase my research on harnessing robust statistics to build robust and trustworthy AI systems. Specifically, I will highlight my research breakthroughs in graph learning (GNNs), large language models (LLMs), deep equilibrium models (DEQs), and general deep representation learning. These breakthroughs stem from a unified and principled robust statistics framework that incorporates robustness as the core inductive bias in deep learning architecture. This approach has enabled significant improvements in intrinsic robustness and generalization, even in complex and challenging environments. My research demonstrates the transformative potential of harnessing robust statistics in enhancing the robustness and trustworthiness of AI systems. Looking forward, I will continue to push this frontier by advocating the design of robustness-informed neural networks across various areas.

Harnessing Robust Statistics for Trustworthy AI

Transfer learning aims to transfer knowledge or information from a source domain to a relevant target domain. It involves two key challenges: distribution shifts and trustworthiness concerns. Having these challenges in mind, my research focuses on understanding transfer learning from the perspective of knowledge transferability (e.g., IID and non-IID learning tasks) and trustworthiness (e.g., adversarial robustness, data privacy, and performance fairness).

Towards Trustworthy Machine Learning Under Distribution Shifts

Along with the broad deployment of deep learning (DL) systems, their lack of trustworthiness, such as their lack of robustness, fairness, and numerical reliability, is raising serious social concerns, especially in safety-critical scenarios such as autonomous driving and aircraft navigation. Hence, a rigorous and accurate evaluation of the trustworthiness of DL systems is essential and would be a prerequisite for improving DL trustworthiness. The first part of the talk will be an overview of certified methods for DL trustworthiness. These methods provide computable guarantees for DL systems in terms of worst-case trustworthiness under certain realistic conditions, such as the accuracy lower bound against arbitrary tiny perturbations. Based on our taxonomy and systematization, we illustrate key methodologies, specifically semantic randomized smoothing and branch-and-bound, and their implications for certified DL trustworthiness.

As a representative of recent DL breakthroughs, large language models (LLMs) are transforming our lives, but, on the other hand, posing more challenges to trustworthiness. For example, LLMs can be jailbroken with adversarial prompts to output harmful content with bias, harassment, misinformation, and more. The second part of the talk will be an overview of LLM trustworthiness. We will start with sharing hands-on experience in developing fontier LLMs, then illustrate common LLM trustworthiness issues via examples, then demonstrate evaluation challenges, take one benchmark as an example, and conclude by envisioning certifiable trustworthiness for LLMs.

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Responsive Dynamic Graph Disentanglement for Metro Flow Forecasting

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