United States

In recent years, visually-rich document understanding has attracted increasing attention. Transformer-based pre-trained models have become the mainstream approach, yielding significant performance gains in this field. However, the self-attention mechanism&#39;s quadratic computational complexity hinders their efficiency and ability to process long documents. In this paper, we present DocMamba, a novel framework based on the state space model. It is designed to reduce computational complexity to linear while preserving global modeling capabilities. To further enhance its effectiveness in document processing, we introduce the Segment-First Bidirectional Scan (SFBS) to capture contiguous semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that DocMamba achieves new state-of-the-art results on downstream datasets such as FUNSD, CORD, and SORIE, while significantly improving speed and reducing memory usage. Notably, experiments on the HRDoc confirm DocMamba&#39;s potential for length extrapolation. The code is included in the supplementary material and will also be available online.

AAAI 2025

DocMamba: Efficient Document Pre-training with State Space Model

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

In recent years, visually-rich document understanding has attracted increasing attention. Transformer-based pre-trained models have become the mainstream approach, yielding significant performance gains in this field. However, the self-attention mechanism's quadratic computational complexity hinders their efficiency and ability to process long documents. In this paper, we present DocMamba, a novel framework based on the state space model. It is designed to reduce computational complexity to linear while preserving global modeling capabilities. To further enhance its effectiveness in document processing, we introduce the Segment-First Bidirectional Scan (SFBS) to capture contiguous semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that DocMamba achieves new state-of-the-art results on downstream datasets such as FUNSD, CORD, and SORIE, while significantly improving speed and reducing memory usage. Notably, experiments on the HRDoc confirm DocMamba's potential for length extrapolation. The code is included in the supplementary material and will also be available online.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

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-25 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.



Text-video retrieval (TVR) has seen substantial advancements in recent years, fueled by the utilization of pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, achieving accurate matching in TVR remains challenging due to inherent disparities between video and textual modalities and irregularities in data representation. In this paper, we propose Text-Video-ProxyNet (TV-ProxyNet), a novel framework designed to decompose the conventional 1-to-$N$ relationship of TVR into $N$ distinct 1-to-1 relationships. By replacing a single text query with a series of text proxies, TV-ProxyNet not only broadens the query scope but also achieves a more precise expansion. Each text proxy is crafted through a refined iterative process, controlled by mechanisms we term as the director and dash, which regulate the proxy's direction and distance relative to the original text query. This setup not only facilitates more precise semantic alignment but also effectively manages the disparities and noise inherent in multimodal data. Our experiments on three representative video-text retrieval benchmarks, MSRVTT, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet Captions, demonstrate the effectiveness of TV-ProxyNet. The results show an improvement of 2.0\% to 3.3\% in R@1 over the baseline. TV-ProxyNet achieved state-of-the-art performance on MSRVTT and ActivityNet Captions, and a 2.0\% improvement on DiDeMo compared to existing methods, validating our approach's ability to enhance semantic mapping and reduce error propensity.

Text Proxy: Decomposing Retrieval from a 1-to-$N$ Relationship into $N$ 1-to-1 Relationships for Text-Video Retrieval

As the global population ages and the incidence of chronic diseases rises, the demand for early detection of abnormal medical conditions is increasing. Traditional health monitoring methods often require significant resources and specialized personnel, limiting their widespread use. Leveraging advancements in AI technologies, this study proposes a non-invasive method for detecting abnormal medical conditions from image data. A multi-modal perception framework is introduced, integrating features from various modalities, including facial expressions and body postures, to enhance detection accuracy. The framework employs a Cascaded Squeeze-Excitation (CSE) module, consisting of Adaptive and Multi-modal Squeeze-Excitation components, to capture complex feature dependencies and improve cross-modal performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showing improved performance over existing methods. Additionally, a new dataset encompassing a wide range of medical conditions has been released, providing a valuable resource for future research in this domain.

MMPF: Multi-Modal Perception Framework for Abnormal Medical Condition Detection

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is an emerging information extraction (IE) task, aiming to simultaneously extract entity spans, types, and corresponding visual regions of entities from given sentence-image pairs data. Recent unified methods employing machine reading comprehension or sequence generation-based frameworks show limitations in this difficult task. The former, utilizing human-designed queries, struggles to differentiate ambiguous entities, such as Jordan (Person) and off-White x Jordan (Shoes). The latter, following the one-by-one decoding order, suffers from exposure bias issues. We maintain that these works misunderstand the relationships of multimodal entities. To tackle these, we propose a novel unified framework named Multi-grained Query-guided Set Prediction Network (MQSPN) to learn appropriate relationships at intra-entity and inter-entity levels. Specifically, MQSPN consists of a Multi-grained Query Set (MQS) and a Multimodal Set Prediction Network (MSP). MQS explicitly aligns entity regions with entity spans by employing a set of learnable queries to strengthen intra-entity connections. Based on distinct intra-entity modeling, MSP reformulates GMNER as a set prediction, guiding models to establish appropriate inter-entity relationships from a global matching perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a query-guided Fusion Net (QFNet) to work as a glue network between MQS and MSP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in widely used benchmarks. Our code is available at Supplementary Material.

Multi-Grained Query-Guided Set Prediction Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Text-to-audio generation models (TAG) such as AudioGen have achieved significant advances in generating audio conditioned on text descriptions. However, a critical challenge lies in the lack of transparency of how textual input contributes to the generated audio. To address this issue, we introduce AudioGenX, an Explainable AI (XAI) method that provides both factual and counterfactual explanations for text-to-audio generation models. AudioGenX optimizes $Explainer$ by leveraging factual and counterfactual objective functions, to provide faithful explanations to be generated at the audio token level. The method offers a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between text inputs and audio outputs, enhancing both the explainability and trustworthiness of TAG models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AudioGenX in producing faithful explanations, which are benchmarked against existing methods using novel evaluation metrics specifically designed for audio generation tasks. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/audiogenX/.

AudioGenX: Explainability on Text-to-Audio Generative Models

Multi-label few-shot image classification is a crucial and challenging task due to limited annotated data and elusive category specificity. However, research on this topic is still in the rudimentary stage and few methods are available. Existing methods either leverage data augmentation to alleviate data scarcity or utilize label features as auxiliary knowledge to eliminate the negative effect caused by irrelevant categories, but they ignore the utilization of image region features for data augmentation, and overlook to learn appropriate text feature to better match the image features of specific categories. Moreover, these methods only focus on one side and do not effectively tackle the above two issues simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce a novel prototype-based multi-label few-shot learning framework that seamlessly integrates pairwise feature augmentation and flexible prompt learning. Specifically, by pairwise feature augmentation, we leverage the region features of images in the support set to generate more image features and construct image prototypes, thus alleviating the issue of data scarcity. By flexible prompt learning, we adaptively acquire class-specific prompts to build text prototypes that highly match the image features of specific classes, thereby mitigating the impact of irrelevant classes. Finally, with adaptive learnable parameters, we merge image and text prototypes to obtain the final prototypes, achieving a more powerful classifier for multi-label few-shot image classification. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can push the performance to a higher level.

Multi-Label Few-Shot Image Classification via Pairwise Feature Augmentation and Flexible Prompt Learning

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) requires the model to transfer knowledge from the data-abundant source domain to data-scarce target domains for fast adaptation, where the large domain gap makes CDFSL a challenging problem.
Masked Autoencoder (MAE) excels in effectively using unlabeled data and learning image's global structures, enhancing model generalization and robustness. However, in the CDFSL task with significant domain shifts, we find MAE even shows lower performance than the baseline supervised models. 
In this paper, we first delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation.
We find that MAE tends to focus on low-level domain information during reconstructing pixels while changing the reconstruction target to token features could mitigate this problem. However, not all features are beneficial, as we then find reconstructing high-level features can hardly improve the model's transferability, indicating a trade-off between filtering domain information and preserving the image's global structure. 
In all, the reconstruction target matters for the CDFSL task.
Based on the above findings and interpretations, we further propose Domain-Agonostic Masked Image Modeling (DAMIM) for the CDFSL task. DAMIM includes an Aggregated Feature Reconstruction module to automatically aggregate features for reconstruction, with balanced learning of domain-agnostic information and images' global structure, and a Lightweight Decoder module to further benefit the encoder's generalizability.
Experiments on four CDFSL datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Reconstruction Target Matters in Masked Image Modeling for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Label correction methods are popular for their simple architecture in learning with noisy labels. However, they suffer severely from false label correction and achieve subpar performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we revisit the label correction methods through theoretical analysis of gradient scaling and demonstrate that the sample-wise dynamic and class-wise uniformity of interpolation weight prevents memorization of the mislabeled samples. We then propose DULC, a simple yet effective label correction method 
that uses the normalized Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) metric as the interpolation weight to promote sample-wise dynamic and class-wise uniformity. Additionally, we provide theoretical evidence that sharpening predictions in label correction facilitates the memorization of true class, and we achieve it by employing the augmentation strategy along with the sharpening function. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, WebVision and Clothing1M datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available in supplementary material.

Revisiting Interpolation for Noisy Label Correction

Generative retrieval constitutes an innovative approach in information retrieval, leveraging generative language models(LM) to generate a ranked list of document identifiers (docid) for a given query. It simplifies the retrieval pipeline by replacing the large external index with model parameters. However, existing works merely learned the relationship between queries and document identifiers, which is unable to directly represent the relevance between queries and documents. To address the above problem, we propose a novel and general generative retrieval framework, namely Leveraging Document-Oriented Contrastive Learning in Generative Retrieval (DOGR), which leverages contrastive learning to improve generative retrieval tasks. It adopts a two-stage learning strategy that captures the relationship between queries and documents comprehensively through direct interactions. Furthermore, negative sampling methods and corresponding contrastive learning objectives are implemented to enhance the learning of semantic representations, thereby promoting a thorough comprehension of the relationship between queries and documents. Experimental results demonstrate that DOGR achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing generative retrieval methods on two public benchmark datasets. Further experiments have shown that our framework is generally effective for common identifier construction techniques.

DOGR: Leveraging Document-Oriented Contrastive Learning in Generative Retrieval

Incomplete multi-view clustering is a challenging task that
perform partition on multi-view data with missing views.
Previous methods directly recover missing instances or fill
in incomplete similarity matrices. However, most of them
suffer from the following limitations: (1) multi-view fusion
and completion are conducted before spectral analysis, resulting
in sub-optimal clustering performance. (2) The complex
optimization process requires heavy computational burden,
limiting their scalability to large-scale problems. In this
paper, we propose a highly efficient rotation-invariant spectral
embedding (RISE) method for scalable incomplete multiview
clustering. Specifically, RISE learns incomplete viewspecific
embeddings from bipartite graphs with incomplete
structural information. Meanwhile, the complete consensus
representation with second-order rotation-invariant property
is recovered from the incomplete view-specific embeddings.
Moreover, we design a fast alternating optimization algorithm
with linear complexity and promising convergence to solve
the proposed formulation. Extensive experiments on multiple
datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability and efficiency
of RISE compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Highly Efficient Rotation-Invariant Spectral Embedding for Scalable Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Point-based interactive colorization techniques allow users to effortlessly colorize grayscale images using user-provided color hints. However, point-based methods often face challenges when different colors are given to semantically similar areas, leading to color intermingling and unsatisfactory results—an issue we refer to as color collapse. The fundamental cause of the color collapse is the inadequacy of points for defining the boundaries for each color. To mitigate color collapse, we introduce a lasso tool that can control the scope of each color hint. Additionally, we design a framework that leverages the user-provided lassos to localize the attention masks. The experimental results show that using a single lasso is as effective as applying 4.18 individual color hints and can achieve the desired outcomes in 30% less time than using points alone.

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Text Proxy: Decomposing Retrieval from a 1-to-$N$ Relationship into $N$ 1-to-1 Relationships for Text-Video Retrieval

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