Singapore

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in vision-language understanding. However, enabling robust video spatial reasoning—the ability to comprehend object locations, orientations, and inter-object relationships in dynamic 3D scenes—remains a key unsolved challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on spatially grounded supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, yet we observe that such models often exhibit query-locked reasoning, focusing narrowly on objects explicitly mentioned in the prompt while ignoring critical contextual cues. To address this limitation, we propose Object-Centric 3D Rollout (OCR), a novel strategy that introduces structured perturbations to the 3D geometry of selected objects during training. By degrading object-specific visual cues and projecting the altered geometry into 2D space, OCR compels the model to reason holistically across the entire scene. We further design a rollout-based training pipeline that jointly leverages vanilla and region-noisy videos to optimize spatial reasoning trajectories. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: our 3B-parameter model achieves 47.5\% accuracy on VSI-Bench, outperforming several 7B baselines. Ablations confirm OCR’s superiority over prior rollout strategies (e.g., T-GRPO, NoisyRollout).

AAAI 2026

Video Spatial Reasoning with Object-Centric 3D Rollout

visual reasoning & symbolic representations

3d computer vision

reinforcement learning

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Neural operators have shown great potential in solving a family of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by modeling the mappings between input and output functions. Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) implements global convolutions via parameterizing the integral operators in Fourier space. However, it often results in over-smoothing solutions and fails to capture local details and high-frequency components. To address these limitations, we investigate incorporating the spatial-frequency localization property of Wavelet transforms into the Transformer architecture. We propose a novel Wavelet Attention (WA) module with linear computational complexity to efficiently learn locality-aware features. Building upon WA, we further develop the Spectral Attention Operator Transformer (SAOT), a hybrid spectral Transformer framework that integrates WA’s localized focus with the global receptive field of Fourier-based Attention (FA) through a gated fusion block. Experimental results demonstrate that WA significantly mitigates the limitations of FA and outperforms existing Wavelet-based neural operators by a large margin. By integrating the locality-aware and global spectral representations, SAOT achieves state-of-the-art performance on six operator learning benchmarks and exhibits strong discretization-invariant ability.

SAOT: An Enhanced Locality-Aware Spectral Transformer for Solving PDEs

The rapid advancement of diffusion-based image editing has enabled highly controllable visual content generation but has also raised serious concerns about the misuse of generative models for producing Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) content. Existing protection strategies inject adversarial perturbations to disrupt editing. However, these methods are untargeted, often degrading benign edits while failing to eliminate harmful outputs. In this work, we propose TarPro, a targeted protection framework that blocks malicious edits while preserving benign editing functionality. TarPro introduces Dual-Intent Optimization (DIO), a semantic alignment objective that suppresses malicious prompt effects while retaining desirable, benign edits, by leveraging prompt compositionality rather than requiring manually annotated preferences. To ensure robustness and generalization, we replace pixel-level optimization with a generator-based perturbation learning strategy that learns to produce structured, imperceptible perturbations in parameter space. Experiments on multiple diffusion backbones show that TarPro significantly blocks NSFW content while maintaining high-quality benign edits, outperforming strong baselines through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

TarPro: Targeted Protection Against Malicious Image Editing

Structure optimization, which yields the relaxed structure (minimum‑energy state), is essential for reliable materials property calculations, yet traditional ab initio approaches such as density‑functional theory (DFT) are computationally intensive. Machine learning (ML) has emerged to alleviate this bottleneck but suffers from two major limitations: (i) existing models operate mainly on atoms, leaving lattice vectors implicit despite their critical role in structural optimization; and (ii) they often rely on multi-stage, non-end-to-end workflows that are prone to error accumulation. Here, we present E$^{3}$Relax—an end-to-end SE(3)‑equivariant graph neural network that maps an unrelaxed crystal directly to its relaxed structure. E$^{3}$Relax promotes both atoms and lattice vectors to graph nodes endowed with dual scalar–vector features, enabling unified, symmetry‑preserving modeling of atomic displacements and lattice deformations. A layer‑wise supervision strategy forces every network depth to make a physically meaningful refinement, mimicking the incremental convergence of DFT while preserving a fully end‑to‑end pipeline. We evaluate E$^{3}$Relax on four benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it achieves remarkable accuracy and efficiency. Through DFT validations, we show that the structures predicted by E$^{3}$Relax are energetically favorable, making them suitable as high-quality initial configurations to accelerate DFT calculations.

Equivariant Atomic and Lattice Modeling Using Geometric Deep Learning for Crystal Structure Optimization

Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) and the human brain converge on similar computational principles remains a fundamental and important question in cognitive neuroscience and AI. Do the brain-like patterns observed in LLMs emerge simply from scaling, or do they reflect deeper alignment with the architecture of human language processing? This study focuses on the sentence-level neural mechanisms of language models, systematically investigating how layer-wise representations in LLMs align with the dynamic neural responses during human sentence comprehension. By comparing hierarchical embeddings from 14 publicly available LLMs with fMRI data collected from participants, who were exposed to a naturalistic narrative story, we constructed sentence-level neural prediction models to identify the model layers most significantly correlated with brain region activations. Results show that improvements in model performance drive the evolution of representational architectures toward brain-like hierarchies, particularly achieving stronger functional and anatomical correspondence at higher semantic abstraction levels. These findings advance our understanding of the computational parallels between LLMs and the human brain, highlighting the potential of LLMs as models for human language processing.

Do Large Language Models Think like the Brain? Sentence-Level Evidences from Layer-Wise Embeddings and fMRI

Significant progress has been made in spoken question answering (SQA) in recent years. However, many existing methods, including large audio language models, struggle with processing long audio. Follow the success of retrieval augmented generation, a speech-related retriever shows promising in help preprocessing long-form speech. But the performance of existing speech-related retrievers is lacking. To address this challenge, we propose CLSR, an end-to-end contrastive language-speech retriever that efficiently extracts question-relevant segments from long audio recordings for downstream SQA task. Unlike conventional speech-text contrastive models, CLSR incorporates an intermediate step that converts acoustic features into text-like representations prior to alignment, thereby more effectively bridging the gap between modalities. Experimental results across four cross-modal retrieval datasets demonstrate that CLSR surpasses both end-to-end speech related retrievers and pipeline approaches combining speech recognition with text retrieval, providing a robust foundation for advancing practical long-form SQA applications.

End-to-End Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining Model for Long-Form Spoken Question Answering

Person re-identification (ReID) is a fundamental task in many real-world applications such as pedestrian trajectory tracking. However, advanced deep learning-based ReID models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations to pedestrian images can cause entirely incorrect predictions, posing significant security threats. Although numerous adversarial defense strategies have been proposed for classification tasks, their extension to metric learning tasks such as person ReID remains relatively unexplored. Moreover, the several existing defenses for person ReID fail to address the inherent unique challenges of adversarially robust ReID. In this paper, we systematically identify the challenges of adversarial defense in person ReID into two key issues: model bias and composite generalization requirements. To address them, we propose a debiased dual-invariant defense framework composed of two main phases. In the data balancing phase, we mitigate model bias using a diffusion-model-based data resampling strategy that promotes fairness and diversity in training data. In the bi-adversarial self-meta defense phase, we introduce a novel metric adversarial training approach incorporating farthest negative extension softening to overcome the robustness degradation caused by the absence of classifier. Additionally, we introduce an adversarially-enhanced self-meta mechanism to achieve dual-generalization for both unseen identities and unseen attack types. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art defenses.

Debiased Dual-Invariant Defense for Adversarially Robust Person Re-Identification

White-Light Imaging (WLI) is the standard for endoscopic cancer screening, but Narrow-Band Imaging (NBI) offers superior diagnostic details. A key challenge is transferring knowledge from NBI to enhance WLI-only models, yet existing methods are critically hampered by their reliance on paired NBI-WLI images of the same lesion, a costly and often impractical requirement that leaves vast amounts of clinical data untapped. In this paper, we break this paradigm by introducing PaGKD, a novel Pairing-free Group-level Knowledge Distillation framework that that enables effective cross-modal learning using unpaired WLI and NBI data. Instead of forcing alignment between individual, often semantically mismatched image instances, PaGKD operates at the group level to distill more complete and compatible knowledge across modalities. Central to PaGKD are two complementary modules: (1) Group-level Prototype Distillation (GKD-Pro) distills compact group representations by extracting modality-invariant semantic prototypes via shared lesion-aware queries; (2) Group-level Dense Distillation (GKD-Den) performs dense cross-modal alignment by guiding group-aware attention with activation-derived relation maps. Together, these modules enforce global semantic consistency and local structural coherence without requiring image-level correspondence. Extensive experiments on four clinical datasets demonstrate that PaGKD consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, boosting AUC by 3.3%, 1.1%, 2.8%, and 3.2%, respectively, establishing a new direction for cross-modal learning from unpaired data.

Pairing-free Group-level Knowledge Distillation for Robust Gastrointestinal Lesion Classification in White-Light Endoscopy

Diffusion strategies have advanced visual motor control by progressively denoising high-dimensional action sequences, providing a promising method for robot manipulation. However, as task complexity increases, the success rate of existing baseline models decreases considerably. Analysis indicates that current diffusion strategies are confronted with two limitations. First, these strategies only rely on short-term observations as conditions. Second, the training objective remains limited to a single denoising loss, which leads to error accumulation and causes grasping deviations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion$\textbf{(ForeDiffusion)}$, by injecting the predicted future view representation into the diffusion process. As a result, the policy is guided to be forward-looking, enabling it to correct trajectory deviations. Following this design, ForeDiffusion employs a dual loss mechanism, combining the traditional denoising loss and the consistency loss of future observations, to achieve the unified optimization. Extensive evaluation on the Adroit suite and the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrates that ForeDiffusion achieves an average success rate of 80\% for the overall task, significantly outperforming the existing mainstream diffusion methods by approximately 20\% in high difficulty tasks, while maintaining more stable performance across the entire task set.

ForeDiffusion: Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion Policy via Future View Construction for Robot Manipulation

To guide a learner in mastering action skills, it is crucial for a coach to 1) reason through the learner's action execution and technical points (TechPoints), and 2) provide detailed, comprehensible feedback on what is done well and what can be improved. However, existing score-based action assessment methods are still far from reaching this practical scenario. To bridge this gap, we investigate a new task termed Descriptive Action Coaching (DescCoach) which requires the model to provide detailed commentary on what is done well and what can be improved beyond a simple quality score for action execution. To this end, we first build a new dataset named EE4D-DescCoach. Through an automatic annotation pipeline, our dataset goes beyond the existing action assessment datasets by providing detailed TechPoint-level commentary. Furthermore, we propose TechCoach, a new framework that explicitly incorporates TechPoint-level reasoning into the DescCoach process. The central to our method lies in the Context-aware TechPoint Reasoner, which enables TechCoach to learn TechPoint-related quality representation by querying visual context under the supervision of TechPoint-level coaching commentary. By leveraging the visual context and the TechPoint-related quality representation, a unified TechPoint-aware Action Assessor is then employed to provide the overall coaching commentary together with the quality score. Combining all of these, we establish a new benchmark for DescCoach and evaluate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments. The data and code will be made publicly available.

TechCoach: Towards Technical-Point-Aware Descriptive Action Coaching

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large reasoning models' performance but suffers from severe inefficiencies, as models often overthink simple problems or underthink complex ones. Current sequence-level optimizations, like length penalties, are too coarse-grained to distinguish core logic from verbose language, precluding the necessary token-level control for efficient reasoning CoT. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Time-Frequency Token Advantage Clipping (TFAC), a novel training framework designed to build efficient large reasoning models via token-level interventions. Specifically, TFAC functions along two dimensions: 1) The Frequency Dimension: It discourages inefficient loops and encourages deeper exploration by dynamically reducing the advantage scores of high-entropy tokens that are repeatedly generated within a single reasoning path. 2) The Time Dimension: It reduces excessive overthinking of the system by establishing a historical baseline for the occurrence count of each critical token in previously successful trajectories, and clipping the advantages of tokens that exceed this baseline during training. Crucially, to preserve the model's exploratory capabilities on novel problems, this suppression mechanism is automatically disabled when no historical record of success is available. Experiments conducted on the Deepseek-Distill-32B and Qwen3-8B models show that TFAC outperforms leading baseline methods, improving performance by 2.3 and 3.1 percentage points, respectively, while simultaneously reducing inference costs by 35\% and 28\% in scenarios where correct answers are generated. These results validate the significant efficacy of TFAC in training large reasoning models that are both powerful and highly efficient.

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SAOT: An Enhanced Locality-Aware Spectral Transformer for Solving PDEs

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SAOT: An Enhanced Locality-Aware Spectral Transformer for Solving PDEs

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Unleashing Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via Textual Representation Guided Reasoning

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