Singapore

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to precisely follow complex and fine-grained lexical instructions is a cornerstone of their utility and controllability. However, evaluating this capability remains a significant challenge. Current methods either rely on subjective and costly human evaluation or on automated ``LLM-as-a-judge&#39;&#39; systems, which suffer from inherent biases and unreliability. Existing programmatic benchmarks, while objective, often lack the expressiveness to test intricate, compositional constraints at a granular level. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{LexInstructEvaL}, a new benchmark and evaluation framework for fine-grained lexical instruction following. Our framework is built upon a formal, rule-based grammar that deconstructs complex instructions into a canonical $\langle \texttt{Procedure, Relation, Value} \rangle$ triplet. This grammar enables the systematic generation of a diverse dataset through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline and facilitates objective verification via a transparent, programmatic engine. Crucially, our engine is not only low-cost and fast but also highly reliable, achieving \textbf{97\% agreement} with expert human judgment. We release our dataset and open-source evaluation tools to facilitate further research into the controllability and reliability of LLMs.

AAAI 2026

LexInstructEval: Lexical Instruction Following Evaluation for Large Language Models

nlp: applications

evaluation and analysis

(large) language models

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to precisely follow complex and fine-grained lexical instructions is a cornerstone of their utility and controllability. However, evaluating this capability remains a significant challenge. Current methods either rely on subjective and costly human evaluation or on automated ``LLM-as-a-judge'' systems, which suffer from inherent biases and unreliability. Existing programmatic benchmarks, while objective, often lack the expressiveness to test intricate, compositional constraints at a granular level. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{LexInstructEvaL}, a new benchmark and evaluation framework for fine-grained lexical instruction following. Our framework is built upon a formal, rule-based grammar that deconstructs complex instructions into a canonical $\langle \texttt{Procedure, Relation, Value} \rangle$ triplet. This grammar enables the systematic generation of a diverse dataset through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline and facilitates objective verification via a transparent, programmatic engine. Crucially, our engine is not only low-cost and fast but also highly reliable, achieving \textbf{97\% agreement} with expert human judgment. We release our dataset and open-source evaluation tools to facilitate further research into the controllability and reliability of LLMs.

poster

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.<br><br>

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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.

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) addresses the challenge of recognizing unseen attribute-object compositions in images, representing a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Current approaches, which primarily focus on semantic alignment or distribution independence of primitives, have not achieved effective state-object decoupling and causal interventional invariance, limiting their performance on unseen compositions. To tackle this challenge, this study introduces I2CD (Invertible Causal framework via Disentangle-Compose-Disentangle), a novel framework that integrates invertible neural networks with causal intervention techniques to achieve state-object disentanglement. The framework employs a disentangle-compose-disentangle mechanism for counterfactual generation within the disentangled representation space, ensuring that modifications to one primitive (attribute or object) maintain independence from the other, thus enabling robust causal disentanglement. Representational consistency is maintained through semantic alignment between initial disentangled representations and their recomposed-then-disentangled counterparts with corresponding textual concepts. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmark datasets—MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA—demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in achieving both disentanglement and compositional generalization in CZSL tasks.

I2CD: An Invertible Causal Framework for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning via Disentangle-Compose-Disentangle

Camera-based 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) plays a crucial role in autonomous driving, enabling voxelized 3D scene understanding for effective scene perception and decision-making. Existing SSC methods have shown efficacy in improving 3D scene representations, but suffer from the inherent input-output dimension gap and annotation-reality density gap, where the 2D planner view from input images with sparse annotated labels leads to inferior prediction of real-world dense occupancy with a 3D stereoscopic view. In light of this, we propose the corresponding High-Dimension High-Density Semantic Scene Completion (HD²-SSC) framework with expanded pixel semantics and refined voxel occupancies. To bridge the dimension gap, a High-dimension Semantic Decoupling module is designed to expand 2D image features along a pseudo third dimension, decoupling coarse pixel semantics from occlusions, and then identify focal regions with fine semantics to enrich image features. To mitigate the density gap, a High-density Occupancy Refinement module is devised with a “detect-and-refine" architecture to leverage contextual geometric and semantic structures for enhanced semantic density with the completion of missing voxels and correction of erroneous ones. Extensive experiments and analyses on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets validate the effectiveness of our HD²-SSC framework.

HD²-SSC: High-Dimension High-Density Semantic Scene Completion for Autonomous Driving

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often face a modality representation gap during pretraining: while language embeddings remain stable, visual representations are highly sensitive to contextual noise (e.g., background clutter). To address this issue, we introduce a visual comprehension stage, which we call \textbf{ViCToR}~(\textbf{Vi}sual \textbf{C}omprehension via \textbf{To}ken \textbf{R}econstruction), a novel pretraining framework for LMMs. ViCToR employs a learnable visual token pool and utilizes the Hungarian matching algorithm to select semantically relevant tokens from this pool for visual token replacement. Furthermore, by integrating a visual token reconstruction loss with dense semantic supervision, ViCToR can learn tokens which retain high visual detail, thereby enhancing the large language model’s (LLM’s) understanding of visual information.
After pretraining on 3 million publicly accessible images and captions, \textbf{ViCToR} achieves state-of-the-art results, improving over LLaVA-NeXT-8B by $10.4\%$, $3.2\%$, and $7.2\%$ on the MMStar, SEED$^{I}$, and RealWorldQA benchmarks, respectively. We will release the code and model weights to facilitate reproducibility.

ViCToR: Improving Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction for Pretraining LMMs

Pan-sharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating the spectral richness of low-resolution multispectral (MS) images with the spatial details of high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images. Although frequency-domain modeling shows great potential in this field, most existing methods are still limited to spatial-domain processing or fail to effectively capture the contextual interactions between frequency and spatial features. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-scale frequency-spatial collaborative fusion approach. A Frequency-Spatial U-Net (FS-UNet) is introduced as the backbone network, in which frequency-spatial modeling blocks are embedded to progressively enhance the frequency-guided spatial contextual modeling capability across layers. To this end, we design a Dual Branch Frequency Attention (DBFA) module that adaptively enhances high- and low-frequency information. In addition, we introduce fine-mid-coarse resolution branches and devise a main-auxiliary multi-scale reconstruction loss to facilitate collaborative optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, our model achieves the fastest inference time among all compared methods, striking an excellent balance between accuracy and efficiency.

Hierarchical Dual-Domain Fusion with Frequency-Guided Spatial Modeling for Pan-Sharpening

Video-based human pose estimation has vast applications such as action recognition, sports analytics, and crime detection. However, this task is challenging as it involves interpreting both spatial context and temporal dynamics to accurately localize human anatomical keypoints in video sequences. Current approaches, often based on attention mechanisms, perform well but struggle in challenging scenarios like rapid motion and pose occlusion. We attribute these failures to two fundamental limitations: spatial uniformity, where models indiscriminately assign attention to both joint-relevant features and background clutter, thereby introducing spatial noise; and temporal rigidity, an inability to adapt to large joint displacements, resulting in severe feature misalignment during rapid motion. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PSTPose, a novel progressive spatiotemporal refinement framework. Specifically, to address the spatial uniformity problem, we propose a Discriminative Feature Enhancement (DFE) module that emphasizes joint-relevant features and a Feature Cluster Grouping (FCG) module that forms compact, semantically meaningful regions. For the temporal rigidity problem, we introduce a Deformable Spatiotemporal Fusion (DSF) module that adaptively aligns features across consecutive frames via deformation-aware sampling. This design ensures robust keypoint localization, particularly in cluttered and dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments on four large-scale benchmarks, PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, PoseTrack21, and Sub-JHMDB, demonstrate that PSTPose establishes a new state-of-the-art. The implementation is anonymously released and available in the supplementary material.

Attentive Keypoint Identification: Progressive Spatiotemporal Refinement for Video-based Human Pose Estimation

We present MoBGS, a novel motion deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework capable of reconstructing sharp and high-quality novel spatio-temporal views from blurry monocular videos in an end-to-end manner. Existing dynamic novel view synthesis (NVS) methods are highly sensitive to motion blur in casually captured videos, resulting in significant degradation of rendering quality. While recent approaches address motion-blurred inputs for NVS, they primarily focus on static scene reconstruction and lack dedicated motion modeling for dynamic objects. To overcome these limitations, our MoBGS introduces a novel Blur-adaptive Latent Camera Estimation (BLCE) method using a proposed Blur-adaptive Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for effective latent camera trajectory estimation, improving global camera motion deblurring. In addition, we propose a Latent Camera-induced Exposure Estimation (LCEE) method to ensure consistent deblurring of both a global camera and local object motions. Extensive experiments on the Stereo Blur dataset and real-world blurry videos show that our MoBGS significantly outperforms the very recent methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance for dynamic NVS under motion blur.

MoBGS: Motion Deblurring Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Blurry Monocular Video

Recent advancements in weakly-supervised video anomaly detection have achieved remarkable performance by applying the multiple instance learning paradigm based on multimodal foundation models such as CLIP to highlight anomalous instances and classify categories.
However, their objectives may tend to detect the most salient response segments, while neglecting to mine diverse normal patterns separated from anomalies, and are prone to category confusion due to similar appearance, leading to unsatisfactory fine-grained classification results.
Therefore, we propose a novel Disentangled Semantic Alignment Network (DSANet) to explicitly separate abnormal and normal features from coarse-grained and fine-grained aspects, enhancing the distinguishability.
Specifically, at the coarse-grained level, we introduce a self-guided normality modeling branch that reconstructs input video features under the guidance of learned normal prototypes, encouraging the model to exploit normality cues inherent in the video, thereby improving the temporal separation of normal patterns and anomalous events.
At the fine-grained level, we present a decoupled contrastive semantic alignment mechanism, which first temporally decomposes each video into event-centric and background-centric components using frame-level anomaly scores and then applies visual-language contrastive learning to enhance class-discriminative representations.
Comprehensive experiments on two standard benchmarks, namely XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, demonstrate that DSANet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. 
Code and models will be publicly available.

Learning to Tell Apart: Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection via Disentangled Semantic Alignment

Personalized image generation aims to produce images of user-specified concepts while enabling flexible editing. Recent training-free approaches, while exhibiting higher computational efficiency than training-based methods, struggle with identity preservation, applicability, and compatibility with diffusion transformers (DiTs). In this paper, we uncover the untapped potential of DiT, where simply replacing denoising tokens with those of a reference subject achieves zero-shot subject reconstruction. This simple yet effective feature injection technique unlocks diverse scenarios, from personalization to image editing. Building upon this observation, we propose \textit{Personalize Anything}, a training-free framework that achieves personalized image generation in DiT through:1) timestep-adaptive token replacement that enforces subject consistency via early-stage injection and enhances flexibility through late-stage regularization, and 2) patch perturbation strategies to boost structural diversity. Our method seamlessly supports layout-guided generation, multi-subject personalization, and mask-controlled editing. Evaluations demonstrate that our method, without requiring any training, achieves state-of-the-art performance in identity preservation and versatility. Our work establishes new insights into DiTs while delivering a practical paradigm for efficient personalization.

Personalize Anything for Free with Diffusion Transformer

Low-frame-rate (LFR) Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is crucial for efficient tracking on edge devices, as it significantly reduces computational and storage demands. However, existing trackers struggle in LFR settings due to large temporal gaps, extreme appearance changes, and motion non-linearity. While Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based trackers are effective at associating objects across these gaps, most operate offline, which prevents their use for online tracking. To address these limitations, we propose GLoMOT, a novel online GNN-based Low-Frame-Rate Multi-Object Tracker designed for robust performance in LFR videos. To bridge the large temporal gaps, we introduce a Dynamic Node Buffer Pool. This acts as a long-term memory, caching the states of absent objects to enable their robust re-association. To tackle extreme motion uncertainty, we propose an adaptive context-aware gating module that dynamically adjusts the weights of positional and appearance features, generating more robust features for predicting node connections. Furthermore, we propose a pseudo-depth feature calculation method. This provides the GNN with critical geometric context, which helps resolve spatial ambiguity arising from occlusions. Extensive experiments on several public MOT benchmarks, including DanceTrack, SportsMOT, MOT17, MOT20 and VisDrone, demonstrate GLoMOT's effectiveness and superiority, particularly in challenging Low-Frame-Rate conditions.

GLoMOT: Efficient Online GNN-based Low-Frame-Rate Multi-Object Tracker

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response quality and domain-specific performance of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to combat hallucinations. In recent research, graph structures have been integrated into RAG to enhance the capture of semantic relations between entities. However, it primarily focuses on low-order pairwise entity relations, limiting the high-order associations among multiple entities. Hypergraph-enhanced approaches address this limitation by modeling multi-entity interactions via hyperedges, but they are typically constrained to inter-chunk entity-level representations, overlooking the global thematic organization and alignment across chunks. Drawing inspiration from the top-down cognitive process of human reasoning, we propose a theme-aligned dual-hypergraph RAG framework (Cog-RAG) that uses a theme hypergraph to capture inter-chunk thematic structure and an entity hypergraph to model high-order semantic relations. Furthermore, we design a cognitive-inspired two-stage retrieval strategy that first activates query-relevant thematic content from the theme hypergraph, and then guides fine-grained recall and diffusion in the entity hypergraph, achieving semantic alignment and consistent generation from global themes to local details. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Cog-RAG significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline approaches. The code is available in supplementary material.

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