Austria

Aerial vision-and-language navigation (VLN) — requiring drones to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments — emerges as a critical embodied AI challenge that bridges human-robot interaction, 3D spatial reasoning, and real-world deployment. Although existing ground VLN agents achieved notable results in indoor and outdoor settings, they struggle in aerial VLN due to the absence of predefined navigation graphs and the exponentially expanding action space in long-horizon exploration. In this work, we propose \textbf{CityNavAgent}, a large language model (LLM)-empowered agent that significantly reduces the navigation complexity for urban aerial VLN. Specifically, we design a hierarchical semantic planning module (HSPM) that decomposes the long-horizon task into sub-goals with different semantic levels. The agent reaches the target progressively by achieving sub-goals with different capacities of the LLM. Additionally, a global memory module storing historical trajectories into a topological graph is developed to simplify navigation for visited targets. Extensive benchmark experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvement. Further experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of different modules of CityNavAgent for aerial VLN in continuous city environments.

ACL 2025

CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory

aerial vision-and-language navigation

urban

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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AAAI 2024

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. 

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### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Current vision-language models (VLMs) understand complex vision-text tasks by extracting overall semantic information from large-scale cross-modal associations. However, extracting from large-scale cross-modal associations often smooths out semantic details and requires large computations, limiting multimodal fine-grained understanding performance and efficiency. To address this issue, this paper proposes a detail-oriented prompt learning (DoPL) method for vision-language models to implement fine-grained multi-modal semantic alignment with merely 0.25M trainable parameters. According to the low-entropy information concentration theory, DoPL explores shared interest tokens from text-vision correlations and transforms them into alignment weights to enhance text prompt and vision prompt via detail-oriented prompt generation. It effectively guides the current frozen layer to extract fine-grained text-vision alignment cues. Furthermore, DoPL constructs detail-oriented prompt generation for each frozen layer to implement layer-by-layer localization of fine-grained semantic alignment, achieving precise understanding in complex vision-text tasks. DoPL performs well in parameter-efficient fine-grained semantic alignment with only 0.12% tunable parameters for vision-language models. The state-of-the-art results over the previous parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and full fine-tuning approaches on six benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DoPL in complex multi-modal tasks.

A Parameter-Efficient and Fine-Grained Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

Cross-modal image-text retrieval is challenging because of the diverse possible associations between content from different modalities. Traditional methods learn a single-vector embedding to represent semantics of each sample, but struggle to capture nuanced and diverse relationships that can exist across modalities. Set-based approaches, which represent each sample with multiple embeddings, offer a promising alternative, as they can capture richer and more diverse relationships. In this paper, we show that, despite their promise, these set-based representations continue to face issues including sparse supervision and set collapse, which limits their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose Maximal Pair Assignment Similarity to optimize one-to-one matching between embedding sets which preserve semantic diversity within the set. We also introduce two loss functions to further enhance the representations: Global Discriminative Loss to enhance distinction among embeddings, and Intra-Set Divergence Loss to prevent collapse within each set. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO and Flickr30k without relying on external data.

Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks permeate real-world applications, posing challenges in orchestrating multi-step reasoning across diverse knowledge domains. While existing approaches have been improved with iterative retrieval, they still struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge. To address this, we propose DualRAG, a synergistic dual-process framework that seamlessly integrates reasoning and retrieval. DualRAG operates through two tightly coupled processes: Reasoning-augmented Querying (RaQ) and progressive Knowledge Aggregation (pKA). They work in concert: as RaQ navigates the reasoning path and generates targeted queries, pKA ensures that newly acquired knowledge is systematically integrated to support coherent reasoning. This creates a virtuous cycle of knowledge enrichment and reasoning refinement. Through targeted fine-tuning, DualRAG preserves its sophisticated reasoning and retrieval capabilities even in smaller-scale models, demonstrating its versatility and core advantages across different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this dual-process approach substantially improves answer accuracy and coherence, approaching, and in some cases surpassing, the performance achieved with oracle knowledge access. These results establish DualRAG as a robust and efficient solution for complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Many-shot in-context learning has recently shown promise as an alternative to finetuning, with the major advantage that the same model can be served for multiple tasks. However, this shifts the computational burden from training-time to inference-time, making deployment of many-shot ICL challenging to justify in-practice. This cost is further increased if a custom demonstration set is retrieved for each inference example. We present Dynamic Block-Sparse Attention, an optimized method for retrieval-based many-shot in-context learning. By combining carefully designed block-sparse attention and retrieval of cached groups of demonstrations, we achieve comparable per-example latency to finetuning while maintaining on average >95% of the best method's accuracy across strong ICL and finetuning baselines. We hope that this will further enable the deployment of many-shot ICL at scale.

Efficient Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Dynamic Block-Sparse Attention

Subjective data, reflecting individual opinions, permeates platforms like Yelp and Amazon, influencing everyday decisions. Upon a user query, collaborative rating platforms return a collection of items ranked in an order that is often not transparent to the users. Then, each item is presented with a collection of reviews in an order that typically is, again, rather opaque. Despite the prevalence of such platforms, little attention has been given to fairness in their context, where groups writing best-ranked reviews for best-ranked items have more influence on users' behavior. We design and evaluate a fairness assessment pipeline that starts with a data collection phase to gather reviews from real-world platforms, by submitting artificial user queries and iterating through rated items. Following that, a group assignment phase computes and infers relevant groups for each review, based on review content and user data. Finally, the third step assesses and evaluates the fairness of rankings for different user groups. The key contributions are comparing group exposure for different queries and platforms and comparing how popular fairness definitions behave in different settings. Experiments on real datasets reveal insights into the impact of item ranking on fairness computation and the varying robustness of these measures.

R-Fairness: Assessing Fairness of Ranking in Subjective Data

Multilingual alignment of sentence representations has mostly required bitexts to bridge the gap between languages. We investigate whether visual information can bridge this gap instead. Image caption datasets are very easy to create without requiring multilingual expertise, so this offers a more efficient alternative for low-resource languages. We find that multilingual image-caption alignment can implicitly align the text representations between languages, languages unseen by the encoder in pretraining can be incorporated into this alignment post-hoc, and these aligned representations are usable for cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and bitext retrieval.

Cross-Lingual Representation Alignment Through Contrastive Image-Caption Tuning

Emerging Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long input context in order to perform complex tasks like document analysis and code generation.
For these long context length applications, the length of the input prompt poses a significant challenge in terms of inference efficiency since the inference costs increase linearly with sequence length.
However, for many of these applications, much of the context in the prompt is fixed across different user inputs, thereby providing the opportunity to perform offline optimizations in order to process user inputs quickly, as they are received. 
We propose Squeezed Attention to accelerate LLM applications where a large portion of the input context is fixed.
We first leverage K-means clustering offline to group the keys for the fixed context based on semantic similarity and represent each cluster with a single centroid value.
During inference, we compare query tokens from the user input with the centroids to predict which keys from the fixed context are semantically relevant, and then compute exact attention using only the important keys, thereby reducing bandwidth and computational costs. 
We also present a hierarchical version of our algorithm which can reduce the complexity of attention from linear to logarithmic with respect to the fixed context length.
We evaluate our method on various long-context benchmarks including LongBench, where it achieves a 3.1$\times$ reduction in KV budget with no noticeable accuracy loss and up to an 8$\times$ reduction with only a 0.5 point accuracy gap for the LLaMA-2-7B-32K, LWM-Text-Chat-1M, and Longchat-7B-v1.5-32K models.
Futhermore, we implement kernels for centroid comparison and sparse FlashAttention with important keys, achieving more than 4$\times$ speedups during both the prefill and generation phases for long-context inference.
Our code is available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/SqueezedAttention.

Squeezed Attention: Fast Fixed Context Processing for Long Context Length LLM Applications

In this paper, we introduce \textit{\textbf{SAIL}-VL} (\textit{\textbf{S}c\textbf{A}lable Vision Language Model Tra\textbf{I}ning via High Qua\textbf{L}ity Data Curation}), an open-source vision language model (VLM) series achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 2B and 8B parameters. The following three key improvements contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a data construction pipeline to enable hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. The resulted dataset SAIL-Caption is validated to be of the highest data quality compared with opensource datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 655B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting logarithmic data size scaling laws in benchmark performance. (3) Scalable SFT via data quantity and complexity scaling: We curate a high-quality SFT dataset collection with leading data quantity scaling effectiveness and demonstrate that training with progressively higher-complexity data surpasses baseline one-stage training by a large margin. 

SAIL-VL series models achieve the highest average score in 18 widely used VLM benchmarks in our evaluation, with the 2B model takes the top position over VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass 2024 (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal), demonstrating robust visual comprehension abilities. SAIL-VL series models are released at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent).

Scalable Vision Language Model Training via High Quality Data Curation

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA, standard LLMs employing Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and its variants such as Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) exhibit significant cost disadvantages. Enabling well-trained LLMs (e.g., Llama) to rapidly adapt to MLA without pre-training from scratch is both meaningful and challenging. This paper proposes the first data-efficient fine-tuning method for transitioning from MHA to MLA (**MHA2MLA**), which includes two key components: for *partial-RoPE*, we remove RoPE from dimensions of queries and keys that contribute less to the attention scores, for *low-rank approximation*, we introduce joint SVD approximations based on the pre-trained parameters of keys and values. These carefully designed strategies enable MHA2MLA to recover performance using only a small fraction (0.6\% to 1\%) of the data, significantly reducing inference costs while seamlessly integrating with compression techniques such as KV cache quantization. For example, the KV cache size of Llama2-7B is reduced by 92.19\%, with only a 1\% drop in LongBench performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/JT-Ushio/MHA2MLA.

Towards Economical Inference: Enabling DeepSeek's Multi-Head Latent Attention in Any Transformer-based LLMs

Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in processing multimodal inputs, yet applications such as visual agents, which require handling multiple images and high-resolution videos, demand enhanced long-range modeling. Moreover, existing open-source VLMs lack systematic exploration into extending their context length, and commercial models often provide limited details. To tackle this, we aim to establish an effective solution that enhances long context performance of VLMs while preserving their capacities in short context scenarios. Towards this goal, we make the best design choice through extensive experiment settings from data curation to context window extending and utilizing: (1) we analyze data sources and length distributions to construct ETVLM - a data recipe to balance the performance across scenarios; (2) we examine existing position extending methods, identify their limitations and propose M-RoPE++ as an enhanced approach; we also choose to solely instruction-tune the backbone with mixed-source data; (3) we discuss how to better utilize extended context windows and propose hybrid-resolution training. Built on the Qwen-VL series model, we propose Giraffe, which is effectively extended to 128K lengths. Evaluated on extensive long context VLM benchmarks such as VideoMME and Viusal Haystacks, our Giraffe achieves state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized open-source long VLMs and is competitive with commercial model GPT-4V. We will open-source the code, data, and models.

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A Parameter-Efficient and Fine-Grained Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

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