Singapore

AI personal assistants, deployed through robots or wearables, require embodied understanding to collaborate effectively with humans. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) primarily focus on third-person (exocentric) vision, overlooking the unique challenges of first-person (egocentric) videos. Additionally, high acquisition costs limit data size, impairing MLLM performance. To address these challenges, we propose learning the mapping between exocentric and egocentric domains, leveraging the extensive exocentric knowledge within existing MLLMs to enhance egocentric video understanding. To this end, we introduce Ego-ExoClip, a pre-training dataset comprising 1.1M synchronized ego-exo clip-text pairs derived from Ego-Exo4D, together with the instruction-tuning dataset EgoIT, which is collected from multiple sources to enhance the model&#39;s instruction-following capabilities. Building upon the datasets, we propose a migration strategy and further design a progressive mapping learning pipeline with three stages: Demonstrator Self-Preparation, Demonstrator-Learner Guidance, and Learner Self-Practice. Extensive experiments across diverse egocentric tasks reveal that existing MLLMs perform inadequately in egocentric video understanding, while our model significantly outperforms these leading models.

AAAI 2026

Exo2Ego: Exocentric Knowledge Guided MLLM for Egocentric Video Understanding

cv: video understanding & activity analysis

cv: language and vision

cv: applications

## 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.

AI personal assistants, deployed through robots or wearables, require embodied understanding to collaborate effectively with humans. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) primarily focus on third-person (exocentric) vision, overlooking the unique challenges of first-person (egocentric) videos. Additionally, high acquisition costs limit data size, impairing MLLM performance. To address these challenges, we propose learning the mapping between exocentric and egocentric domains, leveraging the extensive exocentric knowledge within existing MLLMs to enhance egocentric video understanding. To this end, we introduce Ego-ExoClip, a pre-training dataset comprising 1.1M synchronized ego-exo clip-text pairs derived from Ego-Exo4D, together with the instruction-tuning dataset EgoIT, which is collected from multiple sources to enhance the model's instruction-following capabilities. Building upon the datasets, we propose a migration strategy and further design a progressive mapping learning pipeline with three stages: Demonstrator Self-Preparation, Demonstrator-Learner Guidance, and Learner Self-Practice. Extensive experiments across diverse egocentric tasks reveal that existing MLLMs perform inadequately in egocentric video understanding, while our model significantly outperforms these leading models.

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.

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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.

Perceiving threats is an innate human instinct. During driving, humans naturally focus their attention on objects that pose real potential risks. Motivated by this observation, we shift the focus from traditional class-based detection to a novel task termed threat-oriented reasoning detection in autonomous driving. This task aims to localize threat objects and reason about their threat levels from a driver-centric perspective. To support this task, we build a benchmark comprising diverse corner-case scenarios, annotated by multiple experienced drivers to reflect human-aligned threat cognition. Given the reasoning demands of this task, we then explore the capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and introduce two methods based on whether the MLLM supports object detection: 1) For MLLMs lacking detection capability, we introduce ThreatCoT, a plug-and-play training-free method that combines chain-of-thought (CoT) with a visual expert toolchain to support step-by-step reasoning. 2) For MLLMs with detection support, we introduce ThreatReasoner, an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL)-based method built on the GRPO algorithm, which enables per-object reasoning through a fully unsupervised reward strategy. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our methods can effectively unlock the new capabilities of MLLM in threat-oriented reasoning detection. Code and data are available in https://github.com/harrylin-hyl/Threat-ReasonDet.

Attention to Threat-Relevant Objects: Reasoning Detection in Autonomous Driving via Multimodal Large Language Models

We propose a novel one-stage method, NVB-Face, for generating consistent Novel-View images directly from a single Blind Face image. Existing approaches to novel-view synthesis for objects or faces typically require a high-resolution RGB image as input. When dealing with degraded images, the conventional pipeline follows a two-stage process: first restoring the image to high resolution, then synthesizing novel views from the restored result. However, this approach is highly dependent on the quality of the restored image, often leading to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the final output. To address this limitation, we extract single-view features directly from the blind face image and introduce a feature manipulator that transforms these features into 3D-aware, multi-view latent representations. Leveraging the powerful generative capacity of a diffusion model, our framework synthesizes high-quality, consistent novel-view face images. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms traditional two-stage approaches in both consistency and fidelity.

You Only Need One Stage: Novel-View Synthesis from a Single Blind Face Image

The challenge of accelerated MRI reconstruction lies in recovering high-quality images from undersampled k-space. Recently, the selective state space model (Mamba) has shown promising results in various tasks with balanced global receptive field and computational efficiency, shedding new light on MRI reconstruction. However, existing approaches directly flatten 2D images based on spatial positions and apply Mamba to vision tasks, failing to preserve and explore the content properties. In this paper, we posit that the key to unlocking Mamba's full potential for MRI reconstruction lies in content-aware sequence modeling. We investigate two fundamental challenges: (1) how to reasonably preserve semantic information when converting 2D images into 1D sequences, and (2) how to effectively identify and recover the crucial high-frequency textures. To this end, we introduce CAM, a novel framework that shifts Mamba-based MRI reconstruction from position-based to content-aware sequence modeling. Specifically, we introduce three modules: (1) the Semantic Preservation Scanning Module (SPSM) introduces learnable clustering centers to group similar pixels, establishing the semantic preserved sequence. (2) The Texture Extraction Scanning Module (TESM) acts as a differentiable local texture descriptor to estimate crucial high-frequency information, forming the texture emphasized sequence. (3) The Texture Enhancement Mamba Module (TEMM) further modulates the semantic sequence with texture-informed system matrices derived from the texture sequence, yielding both context- and texture-aware sequential representations. With these enhancements, our CAM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various datasets and under-sampling masks. Codes will be available.

Image Content Matters: An Image Content Aware State Space Model for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction

Most 3D scene generation methods are limited to only generating object bounding box parameters while newer diffusion methods also generate class labels and latent features. Using object size or latent feature, they then retrieve objects from a predefined database. For complex scenes of varied, multi-categorical objects, diffusion-based latents cannot be effectively decoded by current autoencoders into the correct point cloud objects which agree with target classes. We introduce a Class-Partitioned Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (CPVQ-VAE) that is trained to effectively decode object latent features, by employing a pioneering $\textit{class-partitioned codebook}$ where codevectors are labeled by class. To address the problem of $\textit{codebook collapse}$, we propose a $\textit{class-aware}$ running average update which reinitializes dead codevectors within each partition. During inference, object features and class lables, both generated by a Latent-space Flow Matching Model (LFMM) designed specifically for scene generation, are consumed by the CPVQ-VAE. The CPVQ-VAE's class-aware inverse look-up then maps generated latents to codebook entries that are decoded to class-specific point cloud shapes. Thereby, we achieve pure point cloud generation without relying on an external objects database for retrieval. Extensive experiments reveal that our method reliably recovers plausible point cloud scenes, with up to 70.4\% and 72.3\% reduction in Chamfer and Point2Mesh errors on complex living room scenes. We will make our code publicly available.

Class-Partitioned VQ-VAE and Latent Flow Matching for Point Cloud Scene Generation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant results in various tasks, but their practical application is still severely constrained by hallucination issues, which are particularly prominent in reinforcement learning (RL) optimization processes. This paper systematically analyzes the causes of hallucinations in MLLM under RL training, identifying three key factors: (1) The model relies heavely on chained visual reasoning to guide decision-making during RL training. Thus, error and irrelevant information in visual reasoning can easily cause hallucinations, including inaccurate initial visual descriptions that anchor subsequent inferences to incorrect information, as well as redundant and broad inferential information; (2) Insufficient exploration diversity during the policy optimization phase, causing the model to output overly confident results; (3) The destructive conflict between different samples during optimization is a key factor that leads to false associations and unstable parameter updates. To address these issues, we propose a solution framework comprising three core modules. First, to improve the accuracy of visual localization, we add planning and caption stages before thinking and answer stages. To enhance initial visual descriptions ability, we allow LLMs to respond based solely on the caption and provide corresponding caption reward based on the quality of the response. Second, to enhance exploration capabilities, we classify samples based on the mean and variance of the reward distribution and select samples with high reward variance for training, thereby increasing the model's focus on diverse samples. Finally, to mitigate conflicts between training samples, we identify neural tangent kernel (NTK) similarity as the key factor. Rather than minimizing it uniformly, we regulate NTK similarity by grouping sample pairs based on a similarity threshold. An InfoNCE loss is then applied to pull dissimilar pairs closer and push overly similar ones apart, guiding interactions toward a balanced range. We conducted extensive empirical studies on image, video, and standard hallucination evaluation benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the hallucination rate and effectively improves the inference accuracy of MLLMs.

Ground What You See: Hallucination-Resistant MLLMs via Caption Feedback, Diversity-Aware Sampling, and Conflict Regularization

Domain generalization remains a critical challenge for deploying neural networks, particularly in out-of-distribution object detection. The distributional discrepancy between training (e.g., daytime-sunny) and the realistic condition (e.g., night-rainy) inevitably produces imprecise localization and wrong classification. To address these issues, we propose a unified interaction consistency learning (UICL) framework, a novel single-source domain-generalized method designed to learn intra-class domain-invariant representations. Specifically, we put forth a cross-domain interaction mechanism to exchange region proposals between original and augmented pipelines, enriching the diversity of instance-level representations. Building upon this, we propose prediction-guided consistency learning to unify the interaction mechanism and harmonize the cross-domain representations, contributing to a discriminative prediction distribution under domain shift. In addition, we devise a cyclic interaction resilient detection strategy, which mitigates inaccurate predictions suffering from partial occlusion and ambiguous boundaries among different domains. Extensive experiments evidence that UICL significantly improves the robustness of detectors over several target domains, achieving state-of-the-art generalization performance on the diverse weather benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangpeng2001/uicl.

Unified Interaction Consistency Learning for Single-Source Domain-Generalized Object Detection in Urban Scene

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controllable video diffusion, OmniVDiff, aiming to synthesize and comprehend multiple video visual content in a single diffusion model. To achieve this, OmniVDiff treats all video visual modalities in the color space to learn a joint distribution, while employing an adaptive control strategy that dynamically adjusts the role of each visual modality during the diffusion process, either as a generation modality or a conditioning modality. Our framework supports three key capabilities: (1) {Text-conditioned video generation}, where all modalities are jointly synthesized from a textual prompt; (2) {Video understanding}, where structural modalities are predicted from rgb inputs in a coherent manner; and (3) {X-conditioned video generation}, where video synthesis is guided by fine-grained inputs such as depth, canny and segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in video generation tasks and competitive results in video understanding. Its flexibility and scalability make it well-suited for downstream applications such as video-to-video translation, modality adaptation for visual tasks, and scene reconstruction.

OmniVDiff: Omni Controllable Video Diffusion for Generation and Understanding

Multi-view understanding, the ability to reconcile visual information across diverse viewpoints for effective navigation, manipulation, and 3D scene comprehension, is a fundamental challenge in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to be used as embodied agents. While recent MLLMs have shown impressive advances in high-level reasoning and planning, they frequently fall short when confronted with multi-view geometric consistency and cross-view correspondence. To comprehensively evaluate the challenges of MLLMs in multi-view scene reasoning, we introduce All-Angles Bench, a human carefully benchmark with over 2,100 question-answer pairs from 90 diverse, real-world scenes. Our broad evaluation across 38 general-purpose and 3D spatial reasoning MLLMs reveals a substantial performance gap compared to humans. More critically, our analysis identifies two root failure modes: (1) cross-view object mismatch—the inability to establish consistent object correspondence across views; and (2) cross-view spatial misalignment—the failure to infer accurate camera poses and spatial layouts. These findings underscore a lack of multi-view awareness in current MLLMs, calling for architectural innovations beyond prompt tuning alone. We believe that our benchmark offers valuable insights toward building spatially-intelligent MLLMs.

Seeing from Another Perspective: Evaluating Multi-View Understanding in MLLMs

The rapid advancement of vision-language models (VLMs) in 3D domains has accelerated research in text-query-guided point cloud processing, though existing methods underperform in point-level segmentation due to inadequate 3D-text alignment that limits local feature-text context linking. To address this limitation, we propose $\textbf{MR-COSMO}$, a Visual-Text $\textbf{M}$emory $\textbf{R}$ecall and Direct $\textbf{C}$r$\textbf{OS}$s-$\textbf{MO}$dal Alignment Method for Query-Driven 3D Segmentation, establishing explicit alignment between 3D point clouds and text/2D image data through a dedicated direct cross-modal alignment module while implementing a visual-text memory module with specialized feature banks. This direct alignment mechanism enables precise fusion of geometric and semantic features, while the memory module employs specialized banks storing text features, visual features, and their correspondence mappings to dynamically enhance scene-specific representations via attention-based knowledge recall. Comprehensive experiments across 3D instruction, reference, and semantic segmentation benchmarks confirm state-of-the-art performance.

MR-COSMO: Visual-Text Memory Recall and Direct CrOSs-MOdal Alignment Method for Query-Driven 3D Segmentation

Recent advances in Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) have been largely driven by supervised learning on curated datasets, where each expression is assumed to refer to exactly one known object. However, such assumptions rarely hold in real-world scenarios, where expressions can refer to multiple objects, fail to refer to any, or involve novel categories and complex semantics. These challenges define the task of open-world REC, which demands robust generalization and structured reasoning beyond the scope of traditional REC methods. 
In this work, we introduce a novel, training-free framework that decouples visual perception from linguistic reasoning to address open-world REC in a zero-shot setting. Our method first transforms the visual scene into a rich textual representation using an open-vocabulary multimodal perception module. 
It then employs a reasoning language model to interpret the referring expression and perform explicit logical inference over the perceived scene, enabling transparent decision-making and strong generalization in open-world scenarios. 
Experiments on three standard REC benchmarks as well as two more challenging ones, gRefCOCO and D$^3$, demonstrate that our framework achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance, often surpassing supervised baselines.

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