United States

One of the key factors of enabling machine learning models to comprehend and solve real-world tasks is to leverage multimodal data. Unfortunately, annotation of multimodal data is challenging and expensive. Recently, self-supervised multimodal methods that combine vision and language were proposed to learn multimodal representations without annotation. However, these methods often choose to ignore the presence of high levels of noise and thus yield sub-optimal results. In this work, we show that the problem of noise estimation for multimodal data can be reduced to a multimodal density estimation task. Using multimodal density estimation, we propose a noise estimation building block for multimodal representation learning that is based strictly on the inherent correlation between different modalities. We demonstrate how our noise estimation can be broadly integrated and achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art performance on five different benchmark datasets for two challenging multimodal tasks: Video Question Answering and Text-To-Video Retrieval. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical probabilistic error bound substantiating our empirical results and analyze failure cases. Code: https://github.com/elad-amrani/ssml.

AAAI 2021

Noise Estimation Using Density Estimation for Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning

#### *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. 

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

We present a new approach for learning the structure of a treewidth-bounded Bayesian Network (BN). The key to our approach is applying an exact method (based on MaxSAT) locally, to improve the score of a heuristically computed BN. This approach allows us to scale the power of exact methodsâ€”so far only applicable to BNs with several dozens of random variablesâ€”to large BNs with several thousands of random variables. Our experiments show that our method improves the score of BNs provided by state-of-the-art heuristic methods, often significantly.

Turbocharging Treewidth-Bounded Bayesian Network Structure Learning

The robustness of neural networks can be quantitatively indicated by a lower bound within which any perturbation does not alter the original inputâ€™s classification result. A certified lower bound is also a criterion to evaluate the performance of robustness verification approaches. In this paper, we present a tighter linear approximation approach for the robustness verification of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). By the tighter approximation, we can tighten the robustness verification of CNNs, i.e., proving they are robust within a larger 10 perturbation distance. Furthermore, our approach is applicable to general sigmoid-like activation functions. We implement DeepCert, the resulting verification toolkit. We evaluate it with open-source benchmarks, including LeNet and the models trained on MNIST and CIFAR. Experimental results show that DeepCert outperforms other state-of-the-art robustness verification tools with at most 286.28% improvement to the certified lower bound and 1566.76 times speedup for the same neural networks.

Tightening Robustness Verification of Convolutional Neural Networks with Fine-Grained Linear Approximation

Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability (SSAT) is a powerful representation for the concise encoding of quantified decision problems with uncertainty. While it shares commonalities with quantified Boolean formula (QBF) satisfiability and has the same PSPACE-complete complexity, SSAT solving tends to be more challenging as it involves expensive model counting, a.k.a. Sharp-SAT. To date, SSAT solvers, especially those imposing no restrictions on quantification levels, remain much lacking. In this paper, we present a new SSAT solver based on the framework of clause selection and cube distribution previously proposed for QBF solving. With model counting integrated and learning techniques strengthened, our solver is general and effective. Experimental results demonstrate the overall superiority of the proposed algorithm in both solving performance and memory usage compared to the state-of-the-art solvers on a number of benchmark formulas.

A Sharp Leap from Quantified Boolean Formula to Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability Solving

At the working heart of policy iteration algorithms commonly used and studied in the discounted setting of reinforcement learning, the policy evaluation step estimates the value of states with samples from a Markov reward process induced by following a Markov policy in a Markov decision process. We propose a simple and efficient estimator called loop estimator that exploits the regenerative structure of Markov reward processes without explicitly estimating a full model. Our method enjoys a space complexity of O(1) when estimating the value of a single positive recurrent state s unlike TD with O(S) or model-based methods with O(S^2). Moreover, the regenerative structure enables us to show, without relying on the generative model approach, that the estimator has an instance-dependent convergence rate of O~(\sqrt{\tau_s/T}) over steps T on a single sample path, where \tau_s is the maximal expected hitting time to state s. In preliminary numerical experiments, the loop estimator outperforms model-free methods, such as TD(k), and is competitive with the model-based estimator.

Loop Estimator for Discounted Values in Markov Reward Processes

We introduce a new class of time-continuous recurrent neural network models. Instead of declaring a learning system's dynamics by implicit nonlinearities, we construct networks of linear first-order dynamical systems modulated via nonlinear interlinked gates. The resulting models represent dynamical systems with varying (i.e., liquid) time-constants coupled to their hidden state, with outputs being computed by numerical differential equation solvers. These neural networks exhibit stable and bounded behavior, yield superior expressivity within the family of neural ordinary differential equations, and give rise to improved performance on time-series prediction tasks. To demonstrate these properties, we first take a theoretical approach to find bounds over their dynamics, and compute their expressive power by the trajectory length measure in a latent trajectory space. We then conduct a series of time-series prediction experiments to manifest the approximation capability of Liquid Time-Constant Networks (LTCs) compared to classical and modern RNNs.

Liquid Time-Constant Networks

Multi-headed attention heads are a mainstay in transformer-based models. Different methods have been proposed to classify the role of each attention head based on the relations between tokens which have high pair-wise attention. These roles include syntactic (tokens with some syntactic relation), local (nearby tokens), block (tokens in the same sentence) and delimiter (the special [CLS], [SEP] tokens). There are two main challenges with existing methods for classification: (a) there  are no standard scores across studies or across functional roles, and (b) these scores are often average quantities measured across sentences without capturing statistical significance. In this work, we formalize a simple yet effective score that generalizes to all the roles of attention heads and employs hypothesis testing on this score for robust inference. This provides us the right lens to systematically analyze attention heads and confidently comment on many commonly posed questions on analyzing the BERT model. In particular, we comment on the co-location of multiple functional roles in the same attention head, the distribution of attention heads across layers, and effect of fine-tuning for specific NLP tasks on these functional roles. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/iitmnlp/heads-hypothesis

The Heads Hypothesis: A Unifying Statistical Approach towards Understanding Multi-Headed Attention in BERT

End-to-end semantic role labeling (SRL) has been received increasing interest. It performs the two subtasks of SRL: predicate identification and argument role labeling, jointly. Recent work is mostly focused on graph-based neural models, while the transition-based framework with neural networks which has been widely used in a number of closely-related tasks, has not been studied for the joint task yet. In this paper, we present the first work of transition-based neural models for end-to-end SRL. Our transition model incrementally discovers all sentential predicates as well as their arguments by a set of transition actions. The actions of the two subtasks are executed mutually for full interactions. Besides, we suggest high-order compositions to extract non-local features, which can enhance the proposed transition model further. Experimental results on CoNLL09 and Universal Proposition Bank show that our final model can produce state-of-the-art performance, and meanwhile keeps highly efficient in decoding. We also conduct detailed experimental analysis for a deep understanding of our proposed model.

End-to-End Semantic Role Labeling with Neural Transition-Based Model

This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged  feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for recommendation, which enables maximizing cumulative user rewards without online exploration. Specifically, we first introduce a probabilistic generative model for  interactive recommendation, and then propose an effective inference algorithm for discrete and stochastic policy learning based on logged  feedbacks. In order to perform offline learning more effectively, we propose five approaches to minimize the distribution mismatch between the logging policy and recommendation policy: support constraints, supervised regularization, policy constraints, dual constraints and reward extrapolation. We conduct extensive  experiments on two public real-world datasets,  demonstrating that the proposed methods can achieve superior performance over existing supervised learning and reinforcement learning methods for  recommendation.

A General Offline Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interactive Recommendation

Recent work has exposed the vulnerability of computer vision models to vector field attacks. Due to the widespread usage of such models in safety-critical applications, it is crucial to quantify their robustness against such spatial transformations. However, existing work only provides empirical robustness quantification against vector field deformations via adversarial attacks, which lack provable guarantees. In this work, we propose novel convex relaxations, enabling us, for the first time, to provide a certificate of robustness against vector field transformations. Our relaxations are model-agnostic and can be leveraged by a wide range of neural network verifiers. Experiments on various network architectures and different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our method.

Efficient Certification of Spatial Robustness

In semi-supervised learning, one key strategy in exploiting unlabeled data is trying to estimate its pseudo-label based on current predictive model, where the unlabeled data assigned with pseudo-label is further utilized to enlarge labeled data set for model update. Nonetheless, the supervision information conveyed by pseudo-label is  prone to error especially when the performance of initial predictive model is mediocre due to limited amount of labeled data. In this paper, an intermediate unlabeled data exploitation strategy is investigated via partial label assignment, i.e. a set of candidate labels other than a single pseudo-label are assigned to the unlabeled data. We only assume that the ground-truth label of unlabeled data resides in the assigned candidate label set, which is less error-prone than trying to identify the single ground-truth label via pseudo-labeling. Specifically, a multi-class classifier is induced from the partial label examples with candidate labels to facilitate model induction with labeled examples. An iterative procedure is designed to enable labeling information communication between the classifiers induced from partial label examples and labeled examples, whose classification outputs are integrated to yield the final prediction. Comparative studies against state-of-the-art approaches clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed unlabeled data exploitation strategy for multi-class semi-supervised learning.

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Next from AAAI 2021

Turbocharging Treewidth-Bounded Bayesian Network Structure Learning

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Towards Multimodal Cultural Context Modeling for African Languages in Large Language Models

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