Singapore

Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. 
This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. In this work, we propose a **Know**ledge-guided **Co**ntrastive **L**earning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. 
By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition.
We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. 
Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35$\times$ smaller.

AAAI 2026

Seeing and Knowing in the Wild: Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition with Large-scale Knowledge Graphs via Contrastive Learning

multi-model learning

knowledge graph embeddings

representation learning

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

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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.

Despite the impressive performance of large multimodal models (LMMs) in high-level visual tasks, their capacity for image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited. One main reason is that LMMs are primarily trained for high-level tasks (e.g., image captioning), emphasizing unified image semantics extraction under varied quality. Such semantic-aware yet quality-insensitive perception bias inevitably leads to a heavy reliance on image semantics when those LMMs are forced for quality rating. In this paper, instead of retraining or tuning an LMM costly, we propose a training-free debiasing framework, in which the image quality prediction is rectified by mitigating the bias caused by image semantics. Specifically, we first explore several semantic-preserving distortions that can significantly degrade image quality while maintaining identifiable semantics. By applying these specific distortions to the query/test images, we ensure that the degraded images are recognized as poor quality while their semantics remain. During quality inference, both a query image and its corresponding degraded version are fed to the LMM along with a prompt indicating that the query image quality should be inferred under the condition that the degraded one is deemed poor quality. This prior condition effectively aligns the LMM’s quality perception, as all degraded images are consistently rated as poor quality, regardless of their semantic difference. Finally, the quality scores of the query image inferred under different prior conditions (degraded versions) are aggregated using a conditional probability model. Extensive experiments on various IQA datasets show that our debiasing framework could consistently enhance the LMM performance and the code will be publicly available.

Mitigating Perception Bias: A Training-Free Approach to Enhance LMM for Image Quality Assessment

The strong lottery ticket hypothesis (SLTH) conjectures that high-performing subnetworks, called strong lottery tickets (SLTs), are hidden in randomly initialized neural networks.
Although recent theoretical studies have established the SLTH across various neural architectures, the SLTH for transformer architectures still lacks theoretical understanding.
In particular, the current theory of the SLTH does not yet account for the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism, a core component of transformers.
To address this gap, we introduce a theoretical analysis of the existence of SLTs within MHAs.
We prove that, if a randomly initialized MHA of $H$ heads and input dimension $d$ has the hidden dimension $O(d\log(Hd^{3/2}))$ for the key and value, it contains an SLT that approximates an arbitrary MHA with the same input dimension with high probability.
Furthermore, by leveraging this theory for MHAs, we extend the SLTH to transformers without normalization layers.
We empirically validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the approximation error between the SLT within a source model (MHA and transformer) and an approximate target counterpart decreases exponentially by increasing the hidden dimension of the source model.

The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Multi-Head Attention Mechanisms

Structured light (SL) 3D reconstruction captures the precise surface shape of objects, providing high-accuracy 3D data essential for industrial inspection and cultural heritage digitization. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: reliance on scene-specific calibration with manual parameter tuning, and optimization frameworks tailored to specific SL patterns, limiting their generalizability across varied scenarios. We propose General and Unified Structured Light Optimization (GUSLO), a novel framework addressing these issues through two coordinated innovations: (1) single-shot calibration via 2D triangulation-based interpolation that converts sparse matches into dense correspondence fields, and (2) artifact-aware photometric adaptation via explicit transfer functions, balancing generalization and color fidelity. We conduct diverse experiments covering binary, speckle, and color-coded settings. Results show that GUSLO consistently improves accuracy and cross-encoding robustness over conventional methods in challenging industrial and cultural scenarios.

GUSLO: General and Unified Structured Light Optimization

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate by over-committing to spurious visual cues. Prior remedies—Visual and Instruction Contrastive Decoding (VCD, ICD)—mitigate this issue, yet the mechanism remains opaque. We first empirically show that their improvements systematically coincide with redistributions of cross-modal attention. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding (ASCD), which directly steers the attention scores during decoding. ASCD combines (i) positive steering, which amplifies automatically mined text-centric heads—stable within a model and robust across domains—with (ii) negative steering, which dampens on-the-fly identified critical visual tokens. The method incurs negligible runtime/memory overhead and requires no additional training. Across five MLLM backbones and three decoding schemes, ASCD reduces hallucination on POPE, CHAIR, and MMHal-Bench by up to 38.2% while improving accuracy on standard VQA benchmarks, including MMMU, MM-VET, ScienceQA, TextVQA, and GQA. These results position attention steering as a simple, model-agnostic, and principled route to safer, more faithful multimodal generation.

ASCD: Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding for Reducing Hallucination in MLLM

Few-shot Video Object Detection addresses the challenge of detecting novel objects in videos with limited labeled examples, overcoming the constraints of traditional detection methods that require extensive training data. This task presents key challenges, including maintaining temporal consistency across frames affected by occlusion and appearance variations, and achieving novel object generalization without relying on complex region proposals. Our novel object-aware temporal modeling approach addresses these challenges by incorporating a filtering mechanism that selectively propagates high-confidence object features across frames. This enables efficient feature progression, reduces noise accumulation, and enhances detection accuracy in few-shot scenarios. By utilizing few-shot trained detection and classification heads with focused feature propagation, we achieve robust temporal consistency without depending on explicit object tube proposals. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, with significant improvements of 4.3%, 5.9%, 4.0%, and 5.9% in AP on FSVOD-500, FSYTV-40, VidOR, and VidVRD datasets, respectively, in the 5-shot setup. Our approach maintains consistent performance gains across 1-shot, 3-shot, and 10-shot configurations, validating its effectiveness across diverse evaluation scenarios. We will make our code base public upon acceptance of the work.

Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer for Few-Shot Video Object Detection

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems are a cornerstone of modern threat detection and endpoint protection. However, conventional heuristic- and learning-based approaches often fail to address sophisticated and continuously evolving attack patterns. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for behavioral analysis in EDR logs, yet their effectiveness is hindered by the high volume of events and the interleaved nature of behavior sequences---posing significant challenges for long-context modeling and stealthy threat detection. To address these issues, we propose HyperGLLM, a novel detection framework that introduces hypergraph reasoning into LLMs. It first constructs an attribute-value level relation-aware graph to model low-order structural semantics while reducing textual redundancy. Then, it introduces a differential hypergraph module with multi-granularity clustering to capture high-order behavioral dependencies embedded in interleaved events and reinforce threat semantics. Finally, the hypergraph representations are aligned with an LLM for efficient contextual reasoning over potential malicious behaviors. To facilitate empirical evaluation, we curate EDR3.6B-63F, a large-scale EDR dataset containing 3.6 billion events across 63 distinct behavior families. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperGLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by reducing the false alarm rate to 1.67\%, achieving 94.65\% accuracy across 63 behavior families, and improving the modeling efficiency of LLMs on long EDR logs. Our framework and dataset provide a solid foundation for future research and support the development of advanced detection solutions in endpoint security.

HyperGLLM: An Efficient Framework for Endpoint Threat Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Large Language Models

Specifying informative and dense reward functions remains a pivotal challenge in Reinforcement Learning, as it directly affects the efficiency of agent training. In this work, we harness the expressive power of quantitative Linear Temporal Logic on finite traces (($\text{LTL}_f[\mathcal{F}]$)) to synthesize reward monitors that generate a dense stream of rewards for runtime-observable state trajectories. By providing nuanced feedback during training, these monitors guide agents toward optimal behaviour and help mitigate the well-known issue of sparse rewards under long-horizon decision making, which arises under the Boolean semantics dominating the current literature. Our framework is algorithm-agnostic and only relies on a state labelling function, and naturally accommodates specifying non-Markovian properties. Empirical results show that our quantitative monitors consistently subsume and, depending on the environment, outperform Boolean monitors in maximizing a quantitative measure of task completion and in reducing convergence time.

Expressive Temporal Specifications for Reward Monitoring

Tensor Compressive Sensing (TCS) has gained significant attention recently due to its strong ability to preserve the multidimensional structure of data. However, existing TCS methods face three critical challenges: 1) Biased approximation of tensor rank imposed by the convex surrogate Tensor Nuclear Norm (TNN) may interfere with the original low-rank structure of tensor data. 2) Vulnerability to non-Gaussian noise and outliers makes TCS methods highly susceptible to complex noise environments ubiquitous in real-world applications. 
3) Most of them are confined to third-order tensors and cannot handle high-order tensor data effectively. Being aware of these, we propose Robust Tensor Compressive Sensing (RTCS) based on M-estimators with three key innovations: 1) We design a novel M-estimator-based low-rank regularizer for order-$d$ ($d \geq 3$) tensors, which provides a superior approximation of tensor rank and better preserves the original data structure. 2) RTCS incorporates a robust Welsch estimator that adaptively mitigates the influence of complex noises and outliers in tensor recovery. 3) RTCS is developed to handle high-order tensors, thereby allowing for broader applicability beyond conventional third-order tensors. We further design an efficient algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to handle the complex optimization problem. Experiments show that RTCS consistently outperforms existing approaches across various noises.

Robust High-Order Tensor Compressive Sensing Based on M-Estimators

Despite the remarkable progress of Auto-Regressive (AR) image generation, its inference latency remains high due to the AR nature and the ambiguity of image tokens—even when employing Speculative Decoding (SD). Recent works have empirically addressed this issue using relaxed SD, but without theoretical grounding. In this paper, we establish the theoretical foundations of relaxed SD and propose Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding (AnnealRSD), grounded in two key insights. First, by analyzing the total variation (TV) distance between the target model and relaxed SD, we derive the optimal resampling distribution that minimizes an upper bound of the TV distance. Second, perturbation analysis reveals an inherent annealing property of relaxed SD, motivating our annealed design. Together, these components enable AnnealRSD to achieve faster generation with comparable quality, or improved quality at the same latency, compared to existing methods. Extensive experiments on image generation validate the effectiveness of AnnealRSD, showing consistent improvements over prior approaches in speed and quality trade-offs.

Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding for Faster Autoregressive Image Generation

The rapid advancement of generative models has increased the demand for detectors capable of generalizing across diverse and evolving generation techniques. However, existing methods—including those leveraging pre-trained vision-language models—often produce highly entangled representations, mixing task-relevant forensic cues (causal features) with spurious or irrelevant patterns (non-causal features), thus limiting generalization. To address this issue, we propose CausalCLIP, a framework that explicitly disentangles causal from non-causal features and employs targeted filtering guided by causal inference principles to retain only the most transferable and discriminative forensic cues. By modeling the generation process with a structural causal model and enforcing statistical independence through Gumbel-Softmax-based feature masking and Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) constraints, CausalCLIP isolates stable causal features robust to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across various generation models and datasets demonstrate that CausalCLIP significantly improves generalization, achieving gains of 4.06\% in average precision and 6.82\% in accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be publicly available upon publication.

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Mitigating Perception Bias: A Training-Free Approach to Enhance LMM for Image Quality Assessment

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Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences

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