Singapore

Effective clinical history taking is a foundational yet underexplored component of clinical reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on static benchmarks, they often fall short in dynamic, multi-turn diagnostic settings that require iterative questioning and hypothesis refinement. To address this gap, we propose Note2Chat, a note-driven framework that trains LLMs to conduct structured history taking and diagnosis by learning from widely available medical notes. Instead of relying on scarce and sensitive dialogue data, we convert real-world medical notes into high-quality doctor-patient dialogues using a decision tree-guided generation and refinement pipeline. We then propose a three-stage fine-tuning strategy combining supervised learning, simulated data augmentation, and preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-turn reasoning paradigm that reframes history taking as a sequence of single-turn reasoning problems. This design enhances interpretability and enables local supervision, dynamic adaptation, and greater sample efficiency. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves clinical reasoning, achieving gains of +16.9 F1 and +21.0 Top-1 diagnostic accuracy over GPT-4o.

AAAI 2026

Note2Chat: Improving LLMs for Multi-Turn Clinical History Taking Using Medical Notes

multi-turn reasoning

history taking

reinforcement fine-tuning

conversational ai

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a well-known challenge due to deep models often producing overconfident. In this paper, we reveal a key insight that trained classifiers tend to rely on sparse parameter contribution patterns, meaning that only a few dominant parameters drive predictions. This brittleness can be exploited by OOD inputs that anomalously trigger these parameters, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns (SPCP), which enhances OOD detection robustness by encouraging the classifier to learn boundary-oriented dense contribution patterns. Specifically, SPCP operates during training by rectifying excessively high parameter contributions based on a dynamically estimated threshold. This mechanism promotes the classifier to rely on a broader set of parameters for decision-making, thereby reducing the risk of overconfident predictions caused by anomalously triggered parameters, while preserving in-distribution (ID) performance. Extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups verify the effectiveness of SPCP.

Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Adversarial examples in neural networks have been extensively studied in Euclidean settings, but recent advances in _hyperbolic networks_ call for a reevaluation of attack strategies in non-Euclidean geometries. Existing methods such as FGSM and PGD apply perturbations without regard to the underlying hyperbolic structure, potentially leading to inefficient or geometrically inconsistent attacks.
In this work, we propose a novel adversarial attack that explicitly leverages the geometric properties of hyperbolic space. Specifically, we compute the gradient of the loss function in the tangent space of hyperbolic space, decompose it into a radial (depth) component and an angular (semantic) component, and apply perturbation derived solely from the angular direction.
Our method generates adversarial examples by focusing perturbations in semantically sensitive directions encoded in angular movement within the hyperbolic geometry. Empirical results on image classification, cross-modal retrieval tasks and network architectures demonstrate that our attack achieves higher fooling rates than conventional adversarial attacks, while producing high-impact perturbations with deeper insights into vulnerabilities of hyperbolic embeddings. This work highlights the importance of geometry-aware adversarial strategies in curved representation spaces and provides a principled framework for attacking hierarchical embeddings.

Angular Gradient Sign Method: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Hyperbolic Networks

Image Fusion (IF) aims to integrate complementary features from multiple source images into a single image. However, a key challenge in this field is the lack of large-scale real-world training datasets. Existing models typically rely on either small datasets or synthetic, less realistic datasets. To address this, we propose SigFusion, a unified signal-level self-supervised learning paradigm for various IF tasks.The core idea is to use signal-level Pseudo-Label Generation Networks (PLGN) to automatically synthesize training sets and pseudo labels with real multi-source signal characteristics from vast unlabeled natural images.PLGN includes two critical components: learnable 1D Signal Modulators (SM) and SigFormer. SM learns implicit 1D signal patterns across various source images and embeds them into natural images, reducing the domain gap between synthetic and real datasets. SigFormer integrates Transformer with signal processing methods, establishing an appropriate signal representation space for SM. Its cascaded, multi-level design allows hierarchical feature learning from coarse to fine detail. Moreover, SigFormer can serve as a flexible backbone for IF, as its design adheres to the classic decomposition-reconstruction paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that SigFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple IF tasks, including medical image fusion, infrared-visible image fusion, multi-focus image fusion, and multi-exposure image fusion. Our code will be publicly available.

SigFusion: Unified Signal-Level Self-Supervised Learning Paradigm for Image Fusion

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, current benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn scenarios, neglecting the complexity of multi-turn interactions and user diversity. To address this gap, we introduce Talk2Code, the first benchmark designed for user-stratified multi-turn dialogue code generation evaluation across algorithmic problem-solving and backend programming tasks.A distinctive feature of our benchmark is its user-stratified interaction modeling. For identical coding tasks, we construct separate dialogue trajectories tailored for novice, intermediate, and expert users, capturing their distinct expectations and communication patterns.To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing both code quality and interaction experience through a novel Dual-track Evaluation Method. In the Direct Generation Track, the benchmark provides golden dialogue context (excluding the final code) directly to the LLM for code generation. In contrast, the Interactive Dialogue Track simulates realistic multi-turn interactions, prompting the model to proactively clarify instructions and gather requirements before generating solutions.Code quality is evaluated in both tracks by Test Pass Rate and Acceptance Rate, while interaction experience is assessed exclusively within the Interactive Dialogue Track through subjective and alignment indicators. Our benchmark and multi-dimensional indicator system collectively establish a new paradigm for evaluating adaptive, user-aware AI coding assistants.

Talk2Code: A Multi-Turn Interaction Benchmark with Dual-Track Evaluation for Code Generation

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks. However, some questions posed to LRMs are inherently unanswerable, such as math problems lacking sufficient conditions. We find that LRMs continually fail to provide appropriate abstentions when confronted with these unanswerable questions. In this paper, we systematically analyze, investigate, and resolve this issue for trustworthy AI. We first conduct a detailed analysis of the distinct response behaviors of LRMs when facing unanswerable questions. Then, we show that LRMs possess sufficient cognitive capabilities to recognize the flaws in these questions. However, they fail to exhibit appropriate abstention behavior, revealing a misalignment between their internal cognition and external response. Finally, to resolve this issue, we propose a lightweight, two-stage method that combines cognitive monitoring with inference-time intervention. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the abstention rate while maintaining the overall reasoning performance.

Answering the Unanswerable Is to Err Knowingly: Analyzing and Mitigating Abstention Failures in Large Reasoning Models

Existing theoretical work on Bayes-optimal fair classifiers usually considers a single (binary) sensitive feature. In practice, individuals are often defined by multiple sensitive features. In this paper, we characterize the Bayes-optimal fair classifier for multiple sensitive features under general approximate fairness measures, including *mean difference* (MD) and *mean ratio* (MR). We show that these approximate measures for existing group fairness notions, including Demographic Parity, Equal Opportunity, Predictive Equality, and Accuracy Parity, are linear transformations of selection rates for specific groups defined by both labels and sensitive features. We then characterize that Bayes-optimal fair classifiers for multiple sensitive features under both MD and MR become instance-dependent thresholding rules that rely on a weighted sum of these group membership probabilities. Our framework applies to both attribute-aware and attribute-blind settings and can accommodate composite fairness notions like Equalized Odds. Building on this, we propose two practical algorithms for Bayes-optimal fair classification via in-processing and post-processing. We show empirically that our methods compare favorably to existing methods.

Bayes-Optimal Fair Classification with Multiple Sensitive Features

Recent research in Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) has adopted fixed textual keypoint description as semantic prior for two-stage pose matching frameworks. While this paradigm enhances robustness and flexibility by disentangling the dependency of support images, our critical analysis reveals two inherent limitations of static joint embedding: (1) polysemy-induced cross-category ambiguity during the matching process(e.g., the concept "leg" exhibiting divergent visual manifestations across humans and furniture), and (2) insufficient discriminability for fine-grained intra-category variations (e.g., posture and fur discrepancies between a sleeping white cat and a standing black cat). To overcome these challenges, we propose a new framework that innovatively integrates hierarchical cross-modal interaction with dual-stream feature refinement, enhancing the joint embedding with both class-level and instance-specific cues from textual description and specific images. Experiments on the MP-100 dataset demonstrate that, regardless of the network backbone, CapeNext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CAPE methods by a large margin.

CapeNext: Rethinking and Refining Dynamic Support Information for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

Dataset distillation (DD) compresses large datasets into smaller ones while preserving the performance of models trained on them. Although DD is often assumed to enhance data privacy by aggregating over individual examples, recent studies reveal that standard DD can still leak sensitive information from the original dataset due to the lack of formal privacy guarantees. Existing differentially private (DP)-DD methods attempt to mitigate this risk by injecting noise into the distillation process. However, they often fail to fully leverage the original dataset, resulting in degraded realism and utility of the distilled dataset. This paper introduces DP-GenG, a novel framework that addresses the key limitations of current DP-DD by leveraging DP-generated data. Specifically, DP-GenG initializes the distilled dataset with DP-generated data to enhance realism. Then, guided by this data, it refines the DP-feature matching technique to distill the original dataset under a small privacy budget, and trains an expert model to align the distilled examples with their class distribution. Furthermore, we design a privacy budget allocation strategy to determine budget consumptions across DP components and provide a theoretical analysis of the overall privacy guarantees. Extensive experiments show that DP-GenG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art DP-DD methods in terms of both dataset utility and robustness against membership inference attacks, establishing a new paradigm for privacy-preserving dataset distillation.

DP-GenG: Differentially Private Dataset Distillation Guided by DP-Generated Data

Semantic segmentation in real-world applications often requires not only accurate masks but also strict adherence to textual labeling guidelines. These guidelines are typically complex and long, and both human and automated labeling often fail to follow them faithfully. Traditional approaches depend on expensive task-specific retraining that must be repeated as the guidelines evolve. Although recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods excel with simple prompts, they often fail when confronted with sets of paragraph-length guidelines that specify intricate segmentation rules. To address this, we introduce a multi-agent, training-free framework that coordinates general-purpose vision-language models within an iterative Worker-Supervisor refinement architecture. The Worker performs the segmentation, the Supervisor critiques it against the retrieved guidelines, and a lightweight reinforcement learning stop policy decides when to terminate the loop, ensuring guideline-consistent masks while balancing resource use. Evaluated on the Waymo and ReasonSeg datasets, our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating strong generalization and instruction adherence.

Guideline-Consistent Segmentation via Multi-Agent Refinement

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in a parameter-efficient manner while preserving their pre-trained world knowledge remains a significant challenge. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, they do not fully eliminate the loss of critical pre-trained knowledge. In this work, we first analyze the layer-wise distribution of domain-specific knowledge within LLMs through knowledge localization, and empirically identify a clear layer-specific pattern: pre-trained world knowledge predominantly resides in lower layers, whereas knowledge relevant to downstream tasks is more concentrated in higher layers. Motivated by this observation, we propose L2-LoRA, a simple yet effective variant of LoRA that applies layer-specific $L_2$ regularization to the LoRA weights during fine-tuning. Specifically, L2-LoRA imposes stronger regularization on lower layers to preserve pre-trained world knowledge, while allowing greater adaptation in higher layers to better align with downstream tasks. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that L2-LoRA not only consistently outperforms vanilla LoRA in downstream performance, but also effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting by retaining more pre-trained knowledge.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Similar lecture

Section Classification in Clinical Notes with Multi-task Transformers

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES