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Diffusion models, as a type of generative model, have achieved impressive results in generating images and videos conditioned on textual conditions. However, the generation process of diffusion models involves denoising dozens of steps to produce photorealistic images/videos, which is computationally expensive. Unlike previous methods that design ``one-size-fits-all&#39;&#39; approaches for speed up, we argue denoising steps should be sample-specific conditioned on the richness of input texts. To this end, we introduce AdaDiff, a lightweight framework designed to learn instance-specific step usage policies, which are then used by the diffusion model for generation. AdaDiff is optimized using a policy gradient method to maximize a carefully designed reward function, balancing inference time and generation quality. We conduct experiments on three image generation and two video generation benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach achieves similar visual quality compared to the baseline using a fixed 50 denoising steps while reducing inference time by at least 33\%, going as high as 40\%.
Furthermore, our method can be used on top of other acceleration methods to provide further speed benefits.
Lastly, qualitative analysis shows that AdaDiff allocates more steps to more informative prompts and fewer steps to simpler prompts.

AAAI 2025

AdaDiff: Adaptive Step Selection for Fast Diffusion Models

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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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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.

Diffusion models, as a type of generative model, have achieved impressive results in generating images and videos conditioned on textual conditions. However, the generation process of diffusion models involves denoising dozens of steps to produce photorealistic images/videos, which is computationally expensive. Unlike previous methods that design ``one-size-fits-all'' approaches for speed up, we argue denoising steps should be sample-specific conditioned on the richness of input texts. To this end, we introduce AdaDiff, a lightweight framework designed to learn instance-specific step usage policies, which are then used by the diffusion model for generation. AdaDiff is optimized using a policy gradient method to maximize a carefully designed reward function, balancing inference time and generation quality. We conduct experiments on three image generation and two video generation benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach achieves similar visual quality compared to the baseline using a fixed 50 denoising steps while reducing inference time by at least 33\%, going as high as 40\%.
Furthermore, our method can be used on top of other acceleration methods to provide further speed benefits.
Lastly, qualitative analysis shows that AdaDiff allocates more steps to more informative prompts and fewer steps to simpler prompts.

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.



Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient black-box optimizer commonly used in search spaces where hyperparameters are independent. However, in many practical AutoML scenarios, there will be dependencies among hyperparameters, forming a conditional search space, which can be partitioned into structurally distinct subspaces. The structure and dimensionality of hyperparameter configurations vary across these subspaces, challenging the application of BO. Some previous BO works have proposed solutions to develop multiple Gaussian Process models in these subspaces. However, these approaches tend to be inefficient as they require a substantial number of observations to guarantee each GP's performance and cannot capture relationships between hyperparameters across different subspaces. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel approach to model the response surfaces of all subspaces in one, which can model the relationships between hyperparameters elegantly via a self-attention mechanism. Concretely, we design a structure-aware hyperparameter embedding to preserve the structural information. Then, we introduce an attention-based deep feature extractor, capable of projecting configurations with different structures from various subspaces into a unified feature space, where the response surfaces can be formulated using a single standard Gaussian Process. The empirical results on a simulation function, various real-world tasks, and HPO-B benchmark demonstrate that our proposed approach improves the efficacy and efficiency of BO within conditional search spaces.

Modeling All Response Surfaces in One for Conditional Search Spaces

The human brain is a complex system, and understanding its mechanisms has been a long-standing challenge in neuroscience. The study of the functional connectome, which maps the functional connections between different brain regions, has provided valuable insights through various advanced analysis techniques developed over the years. Similarly, neural networks, inspired by the brain's architecture, have achieved notable success in diverse applications but are often noted for their lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that bridges neural networks and human brain functions by leveraging brain-inspired techniques. Our approach, grounded in the insights from the functional connectome, offers scalable ways to characterize topology of large neural networks using stable statistical and machine learning techniques. Our empirical analysis demonstrates its capability to enhance the interpretability of neural networks, providing a deeper understanding of their underlying mechanisms.

Functional Connectomes of Neural Networks

As the size of language models notably grows, fine-tuning the models becomes more challenging: fine-tuning with first-order optimizers (e.g., SGD and Adam) requires high memory consumption, while fine-tuning with a memory-efficient zeroth-order optimizer (MeZO) has a significant accuracy drop and slower convergence rate. In this work, we propose a Low-order Hybrid Optimizer (LoHO) which merges zeroth-order (ZO) and first-order (FO) optimizers for fine-tuning. LoHO is empowered with inter-layer hybrid optimization and intra-layer hybrid optimization, which boosts the accuracy of MeZO while keeping memory usage within a budget. The inter-layer hybrid optimization exploits the FO optimizer in deep layers and the ZO optimizer in shallow ones, therefore avoiding unnecessary gradient propagation to improve memory efficiency. The intra-layer hybrid optimization updates a proportion of parameters in a layer by the ZO optimizer, and the rest by the FO optimizer, taking advantage of gradient sparsity for high efficiency implementation. Our experimental results across common datasets on different pre-trained backbones (i.e., RoBERTa-large, OPT-13B and OPT-30B) demonstrate that LoHO can significantly improve the predictive accuracy and convergence rate of MeZO, while controlling the memory footprint during fine-tuning. Moreover, LoHO can achieve comparable performance with first-order fine-tuning using substantially fewer memory resources.

Towards Efficient Low-Order Hybrid Optimizer for Language Model Fine-Tuning

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) methods typically parameterize models with task-agnostic and task-specific parameters. To adapt task-specific parameters, recent approaches have utilized fixed optimization strategies, despite their potential sub-optimality across varying domains or target tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel adaptation mechanism called Task-Specific Preconditioned gradient descent (TSP). Our method first meta-learns Domain-Specific Preconditioners (DSPs) that capture the characteristics of each meta-training domain, which are then linearly combined using task-coefficients to form the Task-Specific Preconditioner. The preconditioner is applied to gradient descent, making the optimization adaptive to the target task. We constrain our preconditioners to be positive definite, guiding the preconditioned gradient toward the direction of steepest descent. Empirical evaluations on the Meta-Dataset show that TSP achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse experimental scenarios.

Task-Specific Preconditioner for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

In this paper, we explore how to develop salient object detection models using adder neural networks (ANNs), which are more energy efficient than convolutional neural networks (CNNs), especially for real-world applications. Based on our empirical studies, we show that directly replacing the convolutions in CNN-based models with adder layers leads to a substantial loss of activations in the decoder part. This makes the feature maps learned in the decoder lack pattern diversity and hence results in a significant performance drop. To alleviate this issue, by investigating the statistics of the feature maps produced by adder layers, we introduce a simple yet effective differential merging strategy to augment the feature representations learned by adder layers and present a simple baseline for SOD using ANNs. Experiments on popular salient object detection benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method with a simple feature pyramid network (FPN) architecture achieves comparable performance to previous state-of-theart CNN-based models and consumes much less energy. We hope this work could facilitate the development of ANNs in binary segmentation tasks.

Exploring Salient Object Detection with Adder Neural Networks

The connections between symbolic rules and neural networks have been explored in various directions, including rule mining through neural networks and rule-based explanation for neural networks. These approaches allow symbolic rules to be extracted from neural network models, which offers explainability to the models. However, the plausibility of the extracted rules is rarely analysed. In this paper, we show that the confidence degrees of extracted rules are generally not high, and we propose a new family of Graph Neural Networks that can be trained with the guidance of rules. Hence, the inference of our model simulates rule reasoning. Moreover, rules with high confidence degrees can be extracted from the trained model that aligns with the inference of the model, which verifies the effectiveness of the rule guidance. Experimental evaluation of knowledge graph reasoning tasks further demonstrates the effectiveness of our model.

Rule-Guided Graph Neural Networks for Explainable Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Dataset distillation (DD) allows datasets to be distilled to fractions of their original size while preserving the rich distributional information so that models trained on the distilled datasets can achieve a comparable accuracy while saving significant computational loads. Recent research in this area has been focusing on improving the accuracy of models trained on distilled datasets. In this paper, we aim to explore a new perspective of DD. We study how to embed adversarial robustness in distilled datasets, so that models trained on these datasets maintain the high accuracy and meanwhile acquire better adversarial robustness. We propose a new method that achieves this goal by incorporating curvature regularization into the distillation process with much less computational overhead than standard adversarial training. Extensive empirical experiments suggest that our method not only outperforms standard adversarial training on both accuracy and robustness with less computation overhead but is also capable of generating robust distilled datasets that can withstand various adversarial attacks.

Towards Adversarially Robust Dataset Distillation by Curvature Regularization

Personalized federated learning (PFL) on graphs is an emerging field focusing on collaborative model development across multiple clients, where each client has distinct graph data distribution while adhering to strict privacy standards. PFL often requires intensive manual intervention with domain knowledge during model design, which hiders the applications of PFL. Recent advances in AutoML and LLMs enable the automatic design of graph neural network architectures by leveraging the power of neural architecture search and the language generation capability of LLMs. However, several technical challenges persist. First, although LLMs are successful in natural language processing, whether they can be used in graph neural architecture search (GNAS) has not been fully explored. Second, while LLMs can guide graph neural architecture search, they do not directly solve the issue of client drift due to heterogeneous data distributions in federated learning. To address these challenges, we introduce a new method, Personalized Federated Graph Neural Architecture Search (PFGNAS). Our approach uses a new set of task-specific prompts to generate and improve the GNN architectures continuously. To solve client drift, PFGNAS uses a weight-sharing strategy of supernet, which can improve the accuracy of each local graph architecture while ensuring local personalization. Extensive evaluations show that PFGNAS significantly outperforms traditional PFL methods, assuring the benefit of integrating LLMs into personalized federated learning. All materials are accessible through https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PFGNAS-07EE.

Large Language Models Enhanced Personalized Graph Neural Architecture Search in Federated Learning

In recent years, applying multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in various fields has achieved remarkable success. However, as the foundation model for many downstream tasks, MLLMs comprise the well-known Transformer network, which has a less efficient quadratic computation complexity. In this study, we introduce Cobra, a multi-modal large-scale language model built upon a state-space model, which has demonstrated significant potential in efficiently handling long sequences with fast inference and linear scalability concerning sequence length. Specifically, Cobra involves replacing Transformer-based backbone models (e.g., LLaMA or Phi) with pre-trained Mamba language models. We then empirically explore effective strategies for aligning visual and textual modalities and integrating various pre-trained Mamba model variants with visual encoders. Experiments across various multi-modal benchmarks demonstrate that: (i) Cobra performs 3× ∼ 4× faster than the most computationally efficient state-of-the-art methods, e.g., LLaVA-Phi and MobileVLM v2. Additionally, its performance is significantly enhanced thanks to the implementation of linear sequential modeling. (ii) Cobra fine-tunes a small parameter (∼48% of model parameters), leading to a significant improvement in overall performance compared to LLaVA.

Cobra: Extending Mamba to Multi-Modal Large Language Model for Efficient Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination with non-factual or unfaithful statements, which undermines the applications in real-world scenarios. Recent researches focus on uncertainty-based hallucination detection, which utilizes the output probability of LLMs for uncertainty calculation and does not rely on external knowledge or frequent sampling from LLMs. Whereas, most approaches merely
consider the uncertainty of each independent token, while the intricate semantic relations among tokens and sentences are not well studied, which limits the detection of hallucination that spans over multiple tokens and sentences in the passage. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance uncertainty modeling with semantic graph for hallucination detection. Specifically, we first construct a semantic graph that well captures the relations among entity tokens and sentences. Then, we incorporate the relations between two entities for uncertainty propagation to enhance sentence-level hallucination detection. Given that hallucination occurs due to the conflict between sentences, we further present a graph-based uncertainty calibration method that integrates the contradiction probability of the sentence with its neighbors in the semantic graph for uncertainty calculation. Extensive experiments on two datasets show the great advantages of our proposed approach. In particular, we obtain substantial improvements with 19.78% in passage-level hallucination detection.

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