Singapore

Long-context inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is heavily limited by high computational demands.
While several existing methods optimize attention computation, they still process the full set of hidden states at each layer, limiting overall efficiency.
In this work, we propose SlimInfer, an innovative framework that aims to accelerate inference by directly pruning less critical prompt tokens during the forward pass.
Our key insight is an *information diffusion phenomenon*: As information from critical tokens propagates through layers, it becomes distributed across the entire sequence. This diffusion process suggests that LLMs can maintain their semantic integrity when excessive tokens, even including these critical ones, are pruned in hidden states.
Motivated by this, SlimInfer introduces a dynamic fine-grained pruning mechanism that accurately removes redundant tokens of hidden state at intermediate layers. This layer-wise pruning naturally enables an asynchronous KV cache manager that prefetches required token blocks without complex predictors, reducing both memory usage and I/O costs.
Extensive experiments show that SlimInfer can achieve up to $\mathbf{2.53\times}$ time-to-first-token (TTFT) speedup and $\mathbf{1.88\times}$ end-to-end latency reduction for LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct on a single RTX 4090, without sacrificing performance on LongBench.

AAAI 2026

SlimInfer: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Dynamic Token Pruning

inference acceleration

## 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.

poster

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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.

Egocentric gaze prediction serves as a critical indicator for decoding human visual attention and cognitive processes, but its inherently limited field of view creates prediction challenges. Although exo-view data provides supplementary contextual information, it exhibits significant spatial and semantic gaps. Existing methods focus solely on isolated feature encoding in single-view paradigms, neglecting cross-view gaze correlations. To make up for this gap, we make the first exploration of cross-view gaze relationship for egocentric gaze prediction, and propose Ego-PMOVE, a novel Prompt-aware Mixture of View Experts network. Unlike prior cross-view studies that forcibly align cross-view features thereby introducing inference noise, we leverage the popular Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and a set of flexible prompts to disentangle features from different views into three parallel experts: a view-shared expert directly modeling common semantic relationships, a view-discrepancy expert adaptively adjusting the spatial position, scale and shifts based on different view-specific features, and an egocentric expert extracting independent features to compensate for the case of missing exocentric data. To balance these experts, we further design a soft router to dynamically weight them for mining useful information while suppressing noise. A view-query gaze decoder then generates view-specific gaze attention maps, jointly optimized by gaze-heamap and cross-view contrastive loss that regularize both shared and divergent features for accurate gaze prediction. Extensive experiments across the multi-view EgoMe dataset and single-view Ego4D and EGTEA Gaze++ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach. Our code will be released soon.

Ego-PMOVE: Prompt-aware Mixture of View Experts Network for Egocentric Gaze Prediction

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising direction for energy-efficient and brain-inspired computing, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains poorly understood. In this work, we revisit the adversarial robustness of SNNs through the lens of temporal ensembling, treating the network as a collection of evolving sub-networks across discrete timesteps. This formulation uncovers two critical but underexplored challenges—the fragility of individual temporal sub-networks and the tendency for adversarial vulnerabilities to transfer across time. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust Temporal self-Ensemble (RTE), a training framework that improves the robustness of each sub-network while reducing the temporal transferability of adversarial perturbations. RTE integrates both objectives into a unified loss and employs a stochastic sampling strategy for efficient optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that RTE consistently outperforms existing training methods in robust-accuracy trade-off. Additional analyses reveal that RTE reshapes the internal robustness landscape of SNNs, leading to more resilient and temporally diversified decision boundaries. Our study highlights the importance of temporal structure in adversarial learning and offers a principled foundation for building robust spiking models.

Boosting the Robustness-Accuracy Trade-off of SNNs by Robust Temporal Self-Ensemble

Point-based geometric representations such as point clouds and Gaussian Splatting are fundamental for 3D understanding. However, the inherent irregularity and high-dimensional nature of point structures present significant challenges for direct 3D learning approaches, which often struggle with scalability and achieve suboptimal performance due to sparse data distributions. In contrast, 2D learning paradigms benefit from well-established architectures with superior optimization stability and efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose Maniflat3D, a unified framework that systematically transforms volumetric point-based geometries into structured 2D representations through a two-stage process: a multilayer Ball-Pivoting reconstruction with adaptive density control, followed by Scalable Locally Injective Mapping (SLIM) to produce distortion-minimized, bijective UV parameterizations.
Our approach explicitly encodes both geometric and attribute information into the flattened domain, enabling conventional 2D neural networks to effectively learn from complex 3D structures such as Gaussian Splatting. Experiments on the ShapeSplat dataset demonstrate that Maniflat3D achieves comparable performance while reducing parameter count by 90\% compared to native 3D baselines, and simultaneously attains 21× compression ratio through neural encoding. These results establish a new paradigm for efficient geometric understanding, demonstrating successful transfer of planar learning advantages to challenging 3D manifold problems through dimensional reduction.

Maniflat3D: Learning 3D Geometry Through Planar Representations from Multi-Layer Unwrapping

The goal of inductive logic programming (ILP) is to find a set of logical rules that generalises training examples and background knowledge. We introduce an ILP approach that identifies pointless rules. A rule is pointless if it contains a logically redundant literal or cannot discriminate against negative examples. We show that ignoring pointless rules allows an ILP system to efficiently and soundly prune the hypothesis space. Our experiments on multiple domains, including visual reasoning and game playing, show that our approach can reduce learning times by 99% whilst maintaining predictive accuracies.

Efficient Rule Induction by Ignoring Pointless Rules

Motion estimation in degraded scenes has long been a significant challenge, primarily attributed to substantial scene variations and insufficient training data. Existing approaches typically address this limitation by incorporating additional training strategies or modifying network architectures within conventional frameworks. However, these solutions not only require cumbersome training procedures or additional modal inputs, but also lack generalization capabilities. To address this problem, we propose a unified optical flow estimation framework specifically designed for degraded scenes. In this work, we employ large-scale pre-trained optical flow foundation models as both teacher and student networks. Our objective is to compensate for feature incompleteness during image degradation through pre-trained large models. Subsequently, we leverage supervised signals for fine-tuning and introduce an intra-inter frame distillation method to enable the student network to adapt to diverse cross-domain scenarios. Our proposed methodology provides deeper insights into learning style-invariant features from these learnable fine-tuning layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior generalization performance and state-of-the-art results in degraded scenes (including low-light, rain, fog and other conditions) while requiring minimal training resources.

FlowAnyTime: Efficient Fine-tuning with Intra-Inter Frame Distillation for All-Weather Optical Flow Estimation

Image-based virtual try-on (VTON) aims to synthesize photorealistic images of a person wearing specified garments. Despite significant progress, building a universal VTON framework that can flexibly handle diverse and complex tasks remains a major challenge. Recent methods explore multi-task VTON frameworks guided by textual instructions, yet they still face two key limitations: (1) semantic gap between text instructions and reference images, and (2) data scarcity in complex scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose UniFit, a universal VTON framework driven by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Specifically, we introduce an MLLM-Guided Semantic Alignment Module (MGSA), which integrates multimodal inputs using an MLLM and a set of learnable queries. By imposing a semantic alignment loss, MGSA captures cross-modal semantic relationships and provides coherent and explicit semantic guidance for the generative process, thereby reducing the semantic gap. Moreover, by devising a two-stage progressive training strategy with a self-synthesis pipeline, UniFit is able to learn complex tasks from limited data. Extensive experiments show that UniFit not only supports a wide range of VTON tasks, including multi-garment and model-to-model try-on, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

UniFit: Towards Universal Virtual Try-on with MLLM-Guided Semantic Alignment

Collaborative perception leveraging intermediate feature fusion has emerged as a leading paradigm to significantly enhance the environmental perception capabilities of autonomous driving systems. However, existing methods typically rely on discriminative supervision guided by downstream tasks. This paradigm compels models to learn minimal, task-specific representations, which conflicts with the goal of cooperative perception to capture comprehensive information, thereby limiting generalization. To address this issue, we propose DiGS-CP, a novel two-stage generative supervised collaborative perception framework. Specifically, we introduce a diffusion-based generative task that conditions on fused object-level features to generate representations of object-level point clouds. The proposed generative supervision provides fine-grained, task-agnostic signals that encourages the fusion module to learn comprehensive representations beyond task-specific requirements. By preserving and integrating complementary information from collaborative agents, our approach overcomes the limitations of task-specific learning and enhances the generalizability of the learned features. Furthermore, our two-stage architecture requires agents to transmit only object-level features, significantly reducing communication overhead. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DiGS-CP achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D object detection, while maintaining low bandwidth requirements and exhibiting excellent generalization ability. The model and code will be made publicly available.

From Discriminative to Generative: A Diffusion-Based Paradigm for Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception

We study the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs) with
mean as the aggregation function. In the non-uniform setting, we
show that such GNNs have exactly the same expressive power as ratio modal
logic, which has modal operators expressing that at least a
certain
ratio of the successors of a vertex satisfies a specified property.
The non-uniform expressive power of mean GNNs is thus higher than that of GNNs
with max aggregation, but lower than for sum
aggregation--the latter are characterized by modal logic and graded
modal logic, respectively. In the uniform setting, we show that the expressive power relative to MSO is exactly that of alternation-free modal logic, under the natural assumptions that combination functions are continuous and classification functions are thresholds.
This implies that, relative to MSO and in the uniform setting, mean
GNNs are strictly less expressive than sum GNNs and max
GNNs. When any of the assumptions is dropped, the expressive power increases.

Logical Characterizations of GNNs with Mean Aggregation

Non-Markovian Tasks (NMTs) are distinguished by their dependence on long-term memory and state-dependent dynamics, setting them apart from the traditional Markovian models typically employed in Reinforcement Learning (RL). NMTs not only suffer from reward sparseness but also rely on historical information, making their resolution considerably more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel RL framework T4NMTD (Transition-centric framework for NMT Decomposition), designed specifically for learning NMTs which are specified by temporal logic. The core of T4NMTD is a task decomposition mechanism along with a parallel training approach for NMTs. An NMT is first decomposed as basic units based on the transitions of the automata which are derived from temporal logic formulae. The units are then modularized into sub-tasks according to their semantic similarity under logical interpretation. The training strategy of T4NMTD adopts a dual-level structure: the high-level learns to shape the boundaries and coordinate arrangement of the sub-tasks from a global perspective, while the low-level learns those sub-tasks in parallel. In addition, we invent a dynamic policy intervention scheme to mitigate the policy myopic issue during parallel training. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted on benchmark problems with respect to various metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that T4NMTD effectively addresses NMTs, achieving significant performance improvements compared with related studies.

T4NMTD: Transition-Centric Reinforcement Learning for Non-Markovian Task Decomposition

Amodal segmentation is an image-based algorithm that aims to predict masks for both visible and occluded parts of objects. Existing methods typically rely on supervised learning with annotated amodal masks or synthetic data. The effectiveness of these methods relies heavily on the quality of the datasets. This dependence can unintentionally restrict their generalization capabilities due to insufficient diversity and size. Although existing zero-shot methods perform well on their reported datasets, their performance does not necessarily transfer to other datasets. We propose a $\textbf{tuning-free}$ approach that re-purposes diffusion-based inpainting foundation models for amodal segmentation. Our approach is motivated by the “occlusion-free bias” of inpainting models, i.e., the inpainted objects tend to be complete and without occlusions. We reconstruct the occluded regions of an object via inpainting and then apply segmentation, all $\textbf{without additional training or fine-tuning}$. Experiments on five datasets, three previously unreported, demonstrate the generalizability of our approach. On average, our approach achieves 5.3% more accurate masks in mIoU compared to the publicly available state-of-the-art, pix2gestalt.

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Ego-PMOVE: Prompt-aware Mixture of View Experts Network for Egocentric Gaze Prediction

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