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In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these problems, zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function evaluations are often more efficient than FO methods or sometimes the only options. In this paper, we propose a novel zeroth-order inexact augmented Lagrangian method (ZO-iALM) to solve black-box optimization problems, which involve a composite (i.e., smooth+nonsmooth) objective and functional constraints. This appears to be the first work that develops an iALM-based ZO method for functional constrained optimization and meanwhile achieves query complexity results matching the best-known FO complexity results up to a factor of variable dimension. With an extensive experimental study, we show the effectiveness of our method. The applications of our method span from classical optimization problems to practical machine learning examples such as resource allocation in sensor networks and adversarial example generation.

AAAI 2022

Zeroth-Order Optimization for Composite Problems with Functional Constraints

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. <br>
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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.

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 consider applications involving a large set of instances of projecting points to polytopes. We develop an intuition guided by theoretical and empirical analysis to show that when these instances follow certain structures, a large majority of the projections lie on vertices of the polytopes. To do these projections efficiently we derive a vertex-oriented incremental algorithm to project a point onto any arbitrary polytope, as well as give specific algorithms to cater to simplex projection and polytopes where the unit box is cut by planes. Such settings are especially useful in web-scale applications such as optimal matching or allocation problems. Several such problems in internet marketplaces (e-commerce, ride-sharing, food delivery, professional services, advertising, etc.), can be formulated as Linear Programs (LP) with such polytope constraints that require a projection step in the overall optimization process. We show that in some of the very recent works, the polytopic projection is the most expensive step and our efficient projection algorithms help in gaining massive improvements in performance.

Efficient Vertex-Oriented Polytopic Projection for Web-Scale Applications

Federated learning (FL) is a training technique that enables client devices to jointly learn a shared model by aggregating locally computed models without exposing their raw data. While most of the existing work focuses on improving the FL model accuracy, in this paper, we focus on the improving the training efficiency, which is often a hurdle for adopting FL in real world applications. Specifically, we design an efficient FL framework which jointly optimizes model accuracy, processing latency and communication efficiency, all of which are primary design considerations for real implementation of FL. Inspired by the recent success of Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in solving complex control problems, we present FedMarl, a federated learning framework that relies on trained MARL agents to perform efficient run-time client selection. Experiments show that FedMarl can significantly improve model accuracy with much lower processing latency and communication cost.

Learning Advanced Client Selection Strategy for Federated Learning

Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have led to remarkable achievements in face image synthesis. While methods that use style-based GANs can generate strikingly photorealistic face images, it is often difficult to control the characteristics of the generated faces in a meaningful and disentangled way. Prior approaches aim to achieve such semantic control and disentanglement within the latent space of a previously trained GAN. In contrast, we propose a framework that a priori models physical attributes of the face such as 3D shape, albedo, pose, and lighting explicitly, thus providing disentanglement by design. Our method, MOST-GAN, integrates the expressive power and photorealism of style-based GANs with the physical disentanglement and flexibility of nonlinear 3D morphable models, which we couple with a state-of-the-art 2D hair manipulation network. MOST-GAN achieves photorealistic manipulation of portrait images with fully disentangled 3D control over their physical attributes, enabling extreme manipulation of lighting, facial expression, and pose variations up to full profile view.

MOST-GAN: 3D Morphable StyleGAN for Disentangled Face Image Manipulation

Training neural networks with discrete stochastic variables presents a unique challenge. Backpropagation is not directly applicable, nor are the reparameterization tricks used in networks with continuous stochastic variables. To address this challenge, we present Hindsight Network Credit Assignment (HNCA), a novel gradient estimation algorithm for networks of discrete stochastic units. HNCA works by assigning credit to each unit based on the degree to which its output influences its immediate children in the network. We prove that HNCA produces unbiased gradient estimates with reduced variance compared to the REINFORCE estimator, while the computational cost is similar to that of backpropagation. We first apply HNCA in a contextual bandit setting to optimize a reward function that is unknown to the agent. In this setting, we empirically demonstrate that HNCA significantly outperforms REINFORCE, indicating that the variance reduction implied by our theoretical analysis is significant and impactful. We then show how HNCA can be extended to optimize a more general function of the outputs of a network of stochastic units, where the function is known to the agent. We apply this extended version of HNCA to train a discrete variational auto-encoder and empirically show it compares favourably to other strong methods. We believe that the ideas underlying HNCA can help stimulate new ways of thinking about efficient credit assignment in stochastic compute graphs.

Hindsight Network Credit Assignment: Efficient Credit Assignment in Networks of Discrete Stochastic Units

How deep neural networks (DNNs) learn from noisy labels has been studied extensively in image classification but much less in image segmentation. So far, our understanding of the learning behavior of DNNs trained by noisy segmentation labels remains limited. In this study, we address this deficiency in both binary segmentation of biological microscopy images and multi-class segmentation of natural images. We generate extremely noisy labels by randomly sampling a small fraction (e.g., 10%) or flipping a large fraction (e.g., 90%) of the ground truth labels. When trained with these noisy labels, DNNs provide largely the same segmentation performance as trained by the original ground truth. This indicates that DNNs learn structures hidden in labels rather than pixel-level labels per se in their supervised training for semantic segmentation. We refer to these hidden structures in labels as meta-structures. When DNNs are trained by labels with different perturbations to the meta-structure, we find consistent degradation in their segmentation performance. In contrast, incorporation of meta-structure information substantially improves performance of an unsupervised segmentation model developed for binary semantic segmentation. We define meta-structures mathematically as spatial density distributions and show both theoretically and experimentally how this formulation explains key observed learning behavior of DNNs.

Deep Neural Networks Learn Meta-Structures from Noisy Labels in Semantic Segmentation

Adversarial examples causing evasive predictions are widely used to evaluate and improve the robustness of machine learning models. However, current studies focus on supervised learning tasks, relying on the ground truth data label, a targeted objective, or supervision from a trained classifier. In this paper, we propose a framework of generating adversarial examples for unsupervised models and demonstrate novel applications to data augmentation. Our framework exploits a mutual information neural estimator as an information theoretic similarity measure to generate adversarial examples without supervision. We propose a new MinMax algorithm with provable convergence guarantees for the efficient generation of unsupervised adversarial examples. Our framework can also be extended to supervised adversarial examples. When using unsupervised adversarial examples as a simple plugin data augmentation tool for model retraining, significant improvements are consistently observed across different unsupervised tasks and datasets, including data reconstruction, representation learning, and contrastive learning. Our results show novel methods and considerable advantages in studying and improving unsupervised machine learning via adversarial examples.

Adversarial Examples can be Effective Data Augmentation for Unsupervised Machine Learning

In this paper, we propose two new definitions of local differential privacy for belief functions. One is based on Shafer's semantics of randomly coded messages and the other from the perspective of imprecise probabilities. We show that such basic properties as composition and post-processing also hold for our new definitions. Moreover, we provide a hypothesis testing framework for these definitions and study the effect of "don't know" in the trade-off between privacy and utility in discrete distribution estimation.

Local Differential Privacy for Belief Functions

We study algorithms for approximating pairwise similarity matrices that arise in natural language processing. Generally, computing a similarity matrix for n data points requires Omega(n^2) similarity computations.
This quadratic scaling is a significant bottleneck, especially when similarities are computed via expensive functions, e.g., via transformer models.  Approximation methods reduce this quadratic complexity, often by using a small subset of exactly computed similarities to approximate the remainder of the complete pairwise similarity matrix.

Significant  work focuses on the efficient approximation of positive semidefinite (PSD) similarity matrices, which arise e.g., in kernel methods. However, much less is understood about indefinite (non-PSD) similarity matrices, which often  arise in  NLP. Motivated by the observation that many of these matrices are still somewhat close to PSD, we introduce a generalization of the popular Nystrom method to the indefinite setting. Our algorithm can be applied to any similarity matrix and runs in sublinear time in the size of the matrix, producing a rank-s approximation with just O(ns) similarity computations.

We show that our method, along with a simple variant of CUR decomposition, performs very well in approximating a variety of similarity matrices arising in NLP tasks. We demonstrate high accuracy of the approximated similarity matrices in tasks of document classification, sentence similarity, and cross-document coreference.

Sublinear Time Approximation of Text Similarity Matrices

Ensemble Learning is an effective method for improving generalization in machine learning. However, as state-of-the-art neural networks grow larger, the computational cost associated with training several independent networks becomes expensive. We introduce a fast, low-cost method for creating diverse ensembles of neural networks without needing to train multiple models from scratch. We do this by first training a single parent network. We then create child networks by cloning the parent and dramatically pruning the parameters of each child to create an ensemble of members with unique and diverse topologies. We then briefly train each child network for a small number of epochs, which now converge significantly faster when compared to training from scratch. We explore various ways to maximize diversity in the child networks, including the use of anti-random pruning and one-cycle tuning. This diversity enables "Prune and Tune" ensembles to achieve results that are competitive with traditional ensembles at a fraction of the training cost. We benchmark our approach against state of the art low-cost ensemble methods and display marked improvement in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.

Prune and Tune Ensembles: Low-Cost Ensemble Learning with Sparse Independent Subnetworks

We extend the classic regret minimization framework for approximating equilibria in normal-form games by greedily weighing iterates based on regrets observed at runtime. Theoretically, our method retains all previous convergence rate guarantees. Empirically, experiments on large randomly generated games and normal-form subgames of the AI benchmark Diplomacy show that greedy weights outperforms previous methods whenever sampling is used, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.

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Efficient Vertex-Oriented Polytopic Projection for Web-Scale Applications

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Global Adaptive Momentum Meets Local Personalized Perturbation: Efficient Federated LLM Fine-Tuning with Zeroth-Order Gradients

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Efficient Vertex-Oriented Polytopic Projection for Web-Scale Applications

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Global Adaptive Momentum Meets Local Personalized Perturbation: Efficient Federated LLM Fine-Tuning with Zeroth-Order Gradients

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