United States

Materials science text mining (MSTM), involving tasks like property extraction and synthesis action retrieval, is pivotal for advancing research by deriving critical insights from scientific literature. Descriptors, serving as essential task labels, often vary in meaning depending on researchers&#39; usage purposes across different mining tasks. (e.g., Material can refer to both synthesis components and participants in fuel cell experiment). This meaning difference makes it difficult for existing methods, fine-tuned to specific task, to handle the same descriptors in other tasks. To overcome above limitation, we propose MatDuck, a simple and effective approach for Zero-Shot MSTM by evoking material knowledge within large language models (LLMs). Specifically, inspired by the Duck Typing principles in programming languages, we present a ClassDefinition-Style Descriptor generation method that evokes task-specific characteristics to address usage variation. Subsequently, we introduce a code-style in-context learning for zero-shot, which reframes tasks into a code format to better leverage the instantiation capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that MatDuck, as a plug-and-play approach, significantly improves the Zero-Shot MSTM performance of LLMs by an average of 11.3\% across seven tasks, achieving performance comparable to supervised learning.

AAAI 2025

Zero-Shot Learning for Materials Science Texts: Leveraging Duck Typing Principles

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Materials science text mining (MSTM), involving tasks like property extraction and synthesis action retrieval, is pivotal for advancing research by deriving critical insights from scientific literature. Descriptors, serving as essential task labels, often vary in meaning depending on researchers' usage purposes across different mining tasks. (e.g., Material can refer to both synthesis components and participants in fuel cell experiment). This meaning difference makes it difficult for existing methods, fine-tuned to specific task, to handle the same descriptors in other tasks. To overcome above limitation, we propose MatDuck, a simple and effective approach for Zero-Shot MSTM by evoking material knowledge within large language models (LLMs). Specifically, inspired by the Duck Typing principles in programming languages, we present a ClassDefinition-Style Descriptor generation method that evokes task-specific characteristics to address usage variation. Subsequently, we introduce a code-style in-context learning for zero-shot, which reframes tasks into a code format to better leverage the instantiation capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that MatDuck, as a plug-and-play approach, significantly improves the Zero-Shot MSTM performance of LLMs by an average of 11.3\% across seven tasks, achieving performance comparable to supervised learning.

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.



Multi-view clustering (MVC) has achieved remarkable success by leveraging complementary information from different views. Among various approaches, Late Fusion Multi-view Clustering (LFMVC) methods have gained attention for their ability to synthesize base clustering partitions into a unified consensus. However, existing LFMVC methods face challenges in processing noisy and redundant partitions and often overlook high-order correlations across views. In this work, we propose an enhanced LFMVC framework based on a multiple linear kernel K-means approach. Our method introduces a novel generalization error bound that leverages local Rademacher complexity and principal eigenvalue proportion, achieving a convergence rate of $ O(1/\sqrt{nk}) $, a significant improvement over the traditional $ O(k/\sqrt{n}) $ rate. Furthermore, inspired by recent advances in graph filtering, we develop a low-pass filtering strategy to further refine the error bound by improving the principal eigenvalue proportion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of clustering performance.

Sharper Error Bounds in Late Fusion Multi-view Clustering with Eigenvalue Proportion Optimization

Object pose estimation, crucial in computer vision and robotics applications, faces challenges with the diversity of unseen categories. We propose a zero-shot method to achieve category-level 6-DOF object pose estimation, which exploits both 2D and 3D universal features of input color and point clouds to establish semantic similarity-based correspondences and can be extended to unseen categories without additional model fine-tuning. Our method begins with combining efficient 2D universal features to find sparse correspondences between intra-category objects and gets initial coarse pose. To handle the correspondence degradation of 2D universal features if the pose deviates much from the target pose, we use an iterative strategy to optimize the pose. Subsequently, to resolve pose ambiguities due to shape differences between intra-category objects, the coarse pose is refined by optimizing with dense alignment constraint of 3D universal features. Our method outperforms previous methods on the REAL275 and Wild6D benchmarks for unseen categories. We will release our code upon acceptance.

Universal Features Guided Zero-Shot Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, more are being designed to handle long-context inputs. Despite this advancement, most of them still face challenges in accurately handling long-context tasks, often showing the "lost in the middle" issue. We identify that insufficient retrieval capability is one of the important reasons for this issue. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel approach to design training data for long-context tasks, aiming at augmenting LLMs' proficiency in extracting key information from long context. Specially, we incorporate an additional part named "paraphrasing the original text" when constructing the answer of training samples and then fine-tuning the model. Experimenting on LongBench and NaturalQuestions Multi-document-QA dataset with models of Llama and Qwen series, our method achieves an improvement of up to 8.48% and 4.48% in average scores, respectively, showing effectiveness in improving the model’s performance on long-context tasks.

Training with “Paraphrasing the Original Text” Teaches LLM to Better Retrieve in Long-Context Tasks

Recently, numerous robust image hashing schemes have been developed for content identification. However, many of these schemes face the challenges of maintaining discrimination while simultaneously resisting large-scale attacks. In this paper, we propose a robust image hashing scheme based on Contrastive Masked Autoencoder with weak-strong augmentation Alignment (CMAA). Leveraging contrastive learning, CMAA is designed to learn features that are robust to large-scale and hybrid attacks while maintaining the discrimination of those features.  Specially, it utilizes distribution divergence to align weak attack augmented features with strong attack augmented features, namely weak-strong augmentation alignment, for enhancing the robustness to strong attacks. Additionally, a masked vision transformer is incorporated to further boost content identification performance. CMAA also includes a parameter-free quantization layer to mitigate the loss induced by binarization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits remarkable robustness against various attacks, including challenging ones such as rotation and hybrid attacks, and delivers excellent identification performance with an $F_1$ score close to 1.0.

Robust Image Hashing Based on Contrastive Masked Autoencoder with Weak-Strong Augmentation Alignment

Sequential recommendation (SR) systems predict user preferences by analyzing time-ordered interaction sequences. A common challenge for SR is data sparsity, as users typically interact with only a limited number of items. 
While contrastive learning has been employed in previous approaches to address the challenges, these methods often adopt binary labels, missing finer patterns and overlooking detailed information in subsequent behaviors of users. Additionally, they rely on random sampling to select negatives in contrastive learning, which may not yield sufficiently hard negatives during later training stages.
In this paper, we propose Future data utilization with Enduring Negatives for contrastive learning in sequential Recommendation (FENRec). Our approach aims to leverage future data with time-dependent soft labels and generate enduring hard negatives from existing data, thereby enhancing the effectiveness in tackling data sparsity. Experiment results demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance across four benchmark datasets, with an average improvement of 6.16% across all metrics.

Future Sight and Tough Fights: Revolutionizing Sequential Recommendation with FENRec

Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation (OV-SGG) overcomes the limitations of the closed-set assumption by aligning visual relationship representations with open-vocabulary textual representations. This enables the identification of novel visual relationships, making it applicable to real-world scenarios with diverse relationships.  However, existing OV-SGG methods are constrained by fixed text representations, limiting diversity and accuracy in image-text alignment.  To address these challenges, we propose the Relation-Aware Hierarchical Prompting (RAHP) framework, which enhances text representation by integrating subject-object and region-specific relation information.  Our approach employs entity clustering to manage the complexity of the relation triplet category space, ensuring the practicality of incorporating subject-object information.  Additionally, we utilize a large language model (LLM) to generate detailed region-aware prompts, capturing fine-grained visual interactions and improving alignment between visual and textual modalities.  RAHP also introduces a dynamic selection mechanism within Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which adaptively selects relevant text prompts based on the visual content, reducing noise from irrelevant prompts.  Extensive experiments on the Visual Genome and Open Images v6 datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of open-vocabulary scene graph generation.

Relation-aware Hierarchical Prompt for Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation

Blind face video restoration aims to restore high-fidelity details from videos subjected to complex and unknown degradations. This task poses a significant challenge of managing temporal heterogeneity while at the same time maintaining stable face attributes. In this paper, we introduce a Discrete Prior-based Temporal-Coherent content prediction transformer to address the challenge, and our model is referred to as DP-TempCoh. Specifically, we incorporate a spatial-temporal-aware content prediction module to synthesize high-quality content from discrete visual priors, conditioned on degraded video tokens. To further enhance the temporal coherence of the predicted content, a motion statistics modulation module is designed to adjust the content, based on discrete motion priors in terms of cross-frame mean and variance. As a result, the statistics of the predicted content can match with that of real videos over time. By performing extensive experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the design elements and demonstrate the superior performance of our DP-TempCoh in both synthetically and naturally degraded video restoration.

Discrete Prior-based Temporal-coherent Content Prediction for Blind Face Video Restoration

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technology for data privacy and distributed optimization, but it suffers from data imbalance and heterogeneity among clients. Existing FL methods try to solve the problems by aligning client with server model or by correcting client model with control variables. These methods excel on IID and general Non-IID data but perform mediocrely in Simpson's Paradox scenarios. Simpson's Paradox refers to the phenomenon that the trend observed on the global dataset disappears or reverses on a subset, which may lead to the fact that global model obtained through aggregation in FL does not accurately reflect the distribution of global data. Thus, we propose FedCFA, an novel FL framework employing counterfactual learning to generate counterfactual samples by replacing local data critical factors with global average data, aligning local data distributions with the global and mitigating Simpson's Paradox effects.In addition, to improve the counterfactual samples quality, we introduce factor decorrelation (FDC) loss to reduce the correlation among features and thus improve the independence of extracted factors.We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets and verify that our method outperforms other FL methods in terms of efficiency and global model accuracy under limited communication rounds.

FedCFA: Alleviating Simpson's Paradox in Model Aggregation with Counterfactual Federated Learning

If unaligned multimodal medical images can be simultaneously aligned and fused using a single-stage approach within a unified processing framework, it will not only achieve mutual promotion of dual tasks but also help reduce the complexity of the model. However, the design of this model faces the challenge of incompatible requirements for feature fusion and alignment; specifically, feature alignment requires consistency among corresponding features, whereas feature fusion requires the features to be complementary to each other. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an unaligned medical image fusion method called Bidirectional Stepwise Feature Alignment and Fusion (BSFA-F) strategy. To reduce the negative impact of modality differences on cross-modal feature matching, we incorporate the Modal Discrepancy-Free Feature Representation (MDF-FR) method into BSFA-F. MDF-FR utilizes a Modality Feature Representation Head (MFRH) to integrate the global information of the input image. By injecting the information contained in MFRH of the current image into other modality images, it effectively reduces the impact of modality differences on feature alignment while preserving the complementary information carried by different images. In terms of feature alignment, BSFA-F employs a bidirectional stepwise alignment deformation field prediction strategy based on the path independence of vector displacement between two points. This strategy solves the problem of large spans and inaccurate deformation field prediction in single-step alignment. Finally, Multi-Modal Feature Fusion block achieves the fusion of aligned features. The experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

BSAFusion: A Bidirectional Stepwise Feature Alignment Network for Unaligned Medical Image Fusion

Word definition is the most fundamental and crucial linguistic concept. Any changes in word definition lead to changes in the theoretical system of the respective language. Traditionally, researchers in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Vietnamese texts believe Vietnamese words are constructed from syllables. However, their works did not explicitly mention which linguistic theory they followed for this assumption. Although there are no theoretical guarantees, most NLP studies in Vietnamese accept this assumption. Consequently, word segmentation is recognized as one of the essential stages in NLP for Vietnamese texts. In this study, we address the role of word segmentation for Vietnamese texts from the linguistic perspective. Through our extensive experiments, we show that, based on linguistic theories, performing word segmentation in Vietnamese is not required. Moreover, we present a novel method, \textbf{Vi}etnamese \textbf{Word} Trans\textbf{Former} (ViWordFormer), for modeling Vietnamese word formation. Experimental results indicate that our method is appropriate for modeling Vietnamese word formation from both theoretical and experimental aspects and embark a novel approach to Vietnamese word representation. The implementation of our proposed method is available at this link\footnote{The implementation will be publicly available upon the acceptance of this paper.}.

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