Singapore

Online peer-support communities are vital for mental health, but their therapeutic benefit hinges on receiving a timely and helpful first reply. Posts that languish unanswered can exacerbate feelings of distress and abandonment. This paper develops and validates an integrated framework to predict, explain, and reduce this ``reply gap&quot; on Reddit. First, using survival analysis on over 91,000 posts (2018–2025), we show that a deep learning model (DySurv) can accurately predict reply times (C-Index = 0.742), with a post&#39;s lexico-semantic content being a far stronger predictor than author history. Second, moving from correlation to causation, we use a causal inference framework on 48,612 posts to estimate the effect of different support types. We find that initial replies providing emotional support are most effective, increasing the odds of a positive user response by 49% (OR=1.49), an effect most pronounced for high-risk users. Third, we operationalize these insights in RiskMatch, a recommender system that routes at-risk posts to historically effective helpers. Rigorous counterfactual evaluation using inverse propensity scoring (IPS)—a method that corrects for biases in historical data—demonstrates that our system reduces the median wait time by 26 minutes for the highest-risk quintile. This work provides a validated, data-driven methodology to build more responsive and effective peer-support ecosystems, offering a concrete pathway to ensure fewer calls for help go unanswered.

AAAI 2026

Mind the Gap: Predicting, Explaining and Reducing Time-to-First-Comment (Reply Gap) in Online Mental-Health Communities

value-driven behavior

human task generation

intrinsic motivation

embodied cognition

large language models

## 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.

Online peer-support communities are vital for mental health, but their therapeutic benefit hinges on receiving a timely and helpful first reply. Posts that languish unanswered can exacerbate feelings of distress and abandonment. This paper develops and validates an integrated framework to predict, explain, and reduce this ``reply gap" on Reddit. First, using survival analysis on over 91,000 posts (2018–2025), we show that a deep learning model (DySurv) can accurately predict reply times (C-Index = 0.742), with a post's lexico-semantic content being a far stronger predictor than author history. Second, moving from correlation to causation, we use a causal inference framework on 48,612 posts to estimate the effect of different support types. We find that initial replies providing emotional support are most effective, increasing the odds of a positive user response by 49% (OR=1.49), an effect most pronounced for high-risk users. Third, we operationalize these insights in RiskMatch, a recommender system that routes at-risk posts to historically effective helpers. Rigorous counterfactual evaluation using inverse propensity scoring (IPS)—a method that corrects for biases in historical data—demonstrates that our system reduces the median wait time by 26 minutes for the highest-risk quintile. This work provides a validated, data-driven methodology to build more responsive and effective peer-support ecosystems, offering a concrete pathway to ensure fewer calls for help go unanswered.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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-26 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.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Few-shot multimodal industrial anomaly detection is a critical yet underexplored task, offering the ability to quickly adapt to complex industrial scenarios. In few-shot settings, insufficient training samples often fail to cover the diverse patterns present in test samples. This challenge can be mitigated by extracting structural commonality from a small number of training samples. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot unsupervised multimodal industrial anomaly detection method based on structural commonality, CIF (Commonality In Few). To extract intra-class structural information, we employ hypergraphs, which are capable of modeling higher-order correlations, to capture the structural commonality within training samples, and use a memory bank to store this intra-class structural prior. Firstly, we design a semantic-aware hypergraph construction module tailored for single-semantic industrial images, from which we extract common structures to guide the construction of the memory bank. Secondly, we use a training-free hypergraph message passing module to update the visual features of test samples, reducing the distribution gap between test features and features in the memory bank. We further propose a hyperedge-guided memory search module, which utilizes structural information to assist the memory search process and reduce the false positive rate. Experimental results on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and the Eyecandies dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in few-shot settings.

Commonality in Few: Few-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Memory

Unsupervised cross-modal hashing has gained significant attention for efficient retrieval between heterogeneous modalities through encoding data into the unified binary representations, offering low storage cost and fast response. However, the constraints of existing methods persist in bridging the cross-modal semantic gap and capturing fine-grained global semantic structures without explicit labels. In this paper, we propose an innovative unsupervised Stationary distribution and soft Clustering Transformer Hashing approach for cross-modal retrieval, denoted as SCTH. Initially, a Transformer-based modality fusion encoder is employed to extract abundant cross-modal semantic representations, further integrated with contrastive hashing to minimize the semantic gap. To enhance the inter-modal alignment, a pseudo-classifier clustering module with entropy-regularized contrastive loss is presented, ensuring balanced and diverse cluster assignments in unsupervised settings. Additionally, a Markovian stationary distribution strategy stabilizes the feature representations through mitigating the interference of noise and outliers. Comprehensive experiments on MIRFlickr, NUS-WIDE, and IAPR-TC12 datasets validate that SCTH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks, demonstrating superior generalization performance.

Stationary and Clustering Transformer Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval

High spatio‑temporal resolution novel‑view scene rendering is crucial for applications such as sports analysis and scientific experiments. However, existing Dynamic Scene Rendering (DSR) approaches typically rely on conventional RGB cameras with limited frame rates, making it difficult to achieve high spatio‑temporal resolution. In this paper, we present BulletTime4D, a high spatio‑temporal resolution DSR framework, which is the first trial to integrate a spike camera with binocular RGB cameras for dynamic scene reconstruction. Specifically, we first develop a hybrid camera prototype and build a real‑world dynamic scene reconstruction dataset. Then, BulletTime4D presents a multi‑timescale deformation representation by combining low‑frequency spatio‑temporal features with high‑frequency inter‑frame motion features. Finally, a rendering network is designed capable of projecting 4D Gaussians into the spike domain for spike rendering, and a cross‑domain supervision strategy is proposed to achieve high‑frame‑rate texture and color rendering. The results show that BulletTime4D outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on both simulated and real‑world datasets. In addition, BulletTime4D can synthesize 300 FPS novel‑view renderings using stereo RGB cameras at 30 FPS and a single spike camera. Dataset description and more technical details are available in the Appendix.

BulletTime4D: Towards High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Dynamic Scene Rendering via Spike-Guided Stereo Vision

Recognizing fine-grained actions from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences remains a significant challenge, particularly in real-world scenarios where online pose estimation often yields substantial missing data. Existing methods often struggle to accurately recover temporal dynamics and fine-grained spatial structures, resulting in the loss of subtle motion cues crucial for distinguishing similar actions. To address this, we propose FineTec, a unified framework for Fine-grained action recognition under Temporal Corruption. 
FineTec first restores a base skeleton sequence from corrupted input using context-aware completion with diverse temporal masking. 
Next, a skeleton-based spatial decomposition module partitions the skeleton into five semantic regions, further divides them into dynamic and static subgroups based on motion variance, and generates two augmented skeleton sequences via targeted perturbation. These, along with the base sequence, are then processed by a physics-driven estimation module, which utilizes Lagrangian dynamics to estimate joint accelerations. Finally, both the fused skeleton position sequence and the fused acceleration sequence are jointly fed into a GCN-based action recognition head. Extensive experiments on both coarse-grained (NTU-60, NTU-120) and fine-grained (Gym99, Gym288) benchmarks show that FineTec significantly outperforms previous methods under various levels of temporal corruption. Specifically, FineTec achieves top-1 accuracies of 89.1% and 78.1% on the challenging Gym99-severe and Gym288-severe settings, respectively, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability.

FineTec: Fine-Grained Action Recognition Under Temporal Corruption via Skeleton Decomposition and Sequence Completion

Autoregressive models, built based on the Next Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm, show great potential in developing a unified framework that integrates both language and vision tasks. Pioneering works introduce NTP to autoregressive visual generation tasks. In this work, we rethink the NTP for autoregressive image generation and extend it to a novel Next Patch Prediction (NPP) paradigm. Our key idea is to group and aggregate image tokens into patch tokens with higher information density. By using patch tokens as a more compact input sequence, the autoregressive model is trained to predict the next patch, significantly reducing computational costs. To further exploit the natural hierarchical structure of image data, we propose a multi-scale coarse-to-fine patch grouping strategy. With this strategy, the training process begins with a large patch size and ends with vanilla NTP where the patch size is 1x1, thus maintaining the original inference process without modifications. Extensive experiments across a diverse range of model sizes demonstrate that NPP could reduce the training cost to around 0.6 times while improving image generation quality by up to 1.0 FID score on the ImageNet 256x256 generation benchmark. Notably, our method retains the original autoregressive model architecture without introducing additional trainable parameters or specifically designing a custom image tokenizer, offering a flexible and plug-and-play solution for enhancing autoregressive visual generation.

Next Patch Prediction for AutoRegressive Visual Generation

Federated learning enables multiple medical institutions to train a global model without sharing data, yet feature heterogeneity from diverse scanners or protocols remains a major challenge. Many existing works attempt to address this issue by leveraging model representations (e.g., mean feature vectors) to correct local training; however, they often face two key limitations: 1) Contextual Representation Alignment Gap: Current approaches primarily focus on final-layer features, overlooking critical multi-level cues and thus diluting essential context for accurate segmentation. 2) Layerwise Style Bias Accumulation: Although utilizing representations can partially align global features, these methods neglect domain-specific biases within intermediate layers, allowing style discrepancies to build up and reduce model robustness. To address these challenges, we propose FedBCS to bridge feature representation gaps via domain-invariant contextual prototypes alignment. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-domain adaptive style recalibration into prototype construction that not only decouples content-style representations but also learns optimal style parameters, enabling more robust domain-invariant prototypes. Furthermore, we design a context-aware dual-level prototype alignment method that extracts domain-invariant prototypes from different layers of both encoder and decoder and fuses them with contextual information for finer-grained representation alignment. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits remarkable performance.

Divide, Conquer and Unite: Hierarchical Style-Recalibrated Prototype Alignment for Federated Medical Segmentation

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to track multiple objects while maintaining consistent identities across frames of a given video. In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) recorded videos, frequent viewpoint changes and complex UAV-ground relative motion dynamics pose significant challenges, which often lead to unstable affinity measurement and ambiguous association. Existing methods typically model motion and appearance cues separately, overlooking their spatio-temporal interplay and resulting in suboptimal tracking performance. In this work, we propose AMOT, which jointly exploits appearance and motion cues through two key components: an Appearance-Motion Consistency (AMC) matrix and a Motion-aware Track Continuation (MTC) module. Specifically, the AMC matrix computes bi-directional spatial consistency under the guidance of appearance features, enabling more reliable and context-aware identity association. The MTC module complements AMC by reactivating unmatched tracks through appearance-guided predictions that align with Kalman-based predictions, thereby reducing broken trajectories caused by missed detections. Extensive experiments on three UAV benchmarks, including VisDrone2019, UAVDT, and VT-MOT-UAV, demonstrate that our AMOT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and generalizes well in a plug-and-play and training-free manner.

Tracking the Unstable: Appearance-Guided Motion Modeling for Robust Multi-Object Tracking in UAV-Captured Videos

Multi-modality image fusion enhances scene perception by combining complementary information. Unified models aim to share parameters across modalities for multi-modality image fusion, but large modality differences often cause gradient conflicts, limiting performance. Some methods introduce modality-specific encoders to enhance feature perception and improve fusion quality. However, this strategy reduces generalisation across different fusion tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a unified multi-modality image fusion framework based on Channel perturbation and Pre-trained Knowledge Integration (UP-Fusion). To suppress redundant modal information and emphasize key features, we propose the Semantic-Aware Channel Pruning Module (SCPM), which leverages the semantic perception capability of a pre-trained model to filter and enhance multi-modality feature channels. Furthermore, we proposed the Geometric Affine Modulation Module (GAM), which uses original modal features to apply affine transformations on initial fusion features to maintain the feature encoder modal discriminability. Finally, we apply a Text-Guided Channel Perturbation Module (TCPM) during decoding to reshape the channel distribution, reducing the dependence on modality-specific channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods on both multi-modality image fusion and downstream tasks.

Text-Guided Channel Perturbation and Pre-Trained Knowledge Integration for Unified Multi-Modality Image Fusion

The remarkable success of diffusion models in text-to-image generation has sparked growing interest in expanding their capabilities to a variety of multi-modal tasks, including image understanding, manipulation, and perception. These tasks require advanced semantic comprehension across both visual and textual modalities, especially in scenarios involving complex semantic instructions.
However, existing approaches often rely heavily on vision-language models (VLMs) or modular designs for semantic guidance, leading to fragmented architectures and computational inefficiency. To address these challenges, we propose UniAlignment, a unified multimodal generation framework within a single diffusion transformer. UniAlignment introduces a dual-stream diffusion training strategy that incorporates both intrinsic-modal semantic alignment and cross-modal semantic alignment, thereby enhancing the model's cross-modal consistency and instruction-following robustness. Additionally, we present SemGen-Bench, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate multimodal semantic consistency under complex textual instructions. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that UniAlignment outperforms existing baselines, underscoring the significant potential of diffusion models in unified multimodal generation. Models and codes will be released to facilitate reproducibility and encourage future research.

UniAlignment: Semantic Alignment for Unified Image Generation, Understanding, Manipulation and Perception

Fine-tuning Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with a small number of parameters has shown remarkable performance in Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Most existing works either train lightweight adapters or refine intermediate features to achieve better generalization on unseen domains. However, they both overlook the fact that long-term pre-trained VFMs often exhibit artifacts, which hinder the utilization of valuable representations and ultimately degrade DGSS performance. Inspired by causal mechanisms, we observe that these artifacts are associated with non-causal factors, which usually reside in the low- and high-frequency components of the VFM spectrum. In this paper, we explicitly examine the causal and non-causal factors of features within VFMs for DGSS, and propose a simple yet effective method to identify and disentangle them, enabling more robust domain generalization. Specifically, we propose Causal-Tune, a novel fine-tuning strategy designed to extract causal factors and suppress non-causal ones from the features of VFMs. First, we extract the frequency spectrum of features from each layer using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). A Gaussian band-pass filter is then applied to separate the spectrum into causal and non-causal components. To further refine the causal components, we introduce a set of causal-aware learnable tokens that operate in the frequency domain, while the non-causal components are discarded. Finally, refined features are transformed back into the spatial domain via inverse DCT and passed to the next layer. Extensive experiments conducted on various cross-domain tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Causal-Tune. In particular, our method achieves superior performance under adverse weather conditions, improving +4.8% mIoU over the baseline in snow conditions. The code is available in the supplementary material.

Next from AAAI 2026

Commonality in Few: Few-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Memory

Similar lecture

Assess and Prompt: A Generative RL Framework for Improving Engagement in Online Mental Health Communities