Singapore

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, which leverages the strengths of both pre-trained language models and external knowledge. While significant progress has been made, the scaling behavior of these approaches during inference remains poorly understood. Towards this end, this paper presents a comprehensive study of inference scaling law for RAG models, which investigates how inference performance scales with respect to key factors including retriever model scale, generator model scale, number of retrieved documents, and context window size. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we establish empirical scaling laws that reveal power-law and sigmoid-type relationships between these factors and performance. We further build a joint inference scaling law with theoretical justification. With the proposed scaling laws, we can understand the performance tendency of RAG models under different computational resources. We believe our insights can pave the way for efficient and effective deployment of RAG models in more applications.

AAAI 2026

Inference Scaling Law for Retrieval Augmented Generation

scaling law

retrieval augmented generation

inference

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*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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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

technical paper

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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.

Cross-modal retrieval is crucial for discovering latent correspondences across different modalities. However, existing methods typically assume that training data are well-aligned, an unrealistic assumption since real-world datasets inevitably contain noisy correspondences. Many current approaches attempt to handle noise using strategies borrowed from single-modal classification, such as the small-loss trick, to identify clean training pairs. However, our experiments reveal that such small-loss-based strategies are less effective for multi-modal tasks due to the inherent modality gaps. Through comprehensive analysis, we
observe that the deviation directions between paired image-caption
features, termed Sample-level Alignment Drift (SAD), are compact
and data-dependent. Leveraging this discovery, we introduce the Modality Gap Corrected Similarity (MGCS) framework that can more accurately measure the semantic distances of cross-modal samples, dynamically compensating for misalignments. Within MGCS, we can achieve more reliable noisy data separation to promote correct supervision during cross-modal matching model training. Extensive experiments on three widely used noisy correspondence benchmarks demonstrate that MGCS significantly surpasses current state-of-the-art methods.

Noisy Correspondence Learning with Modality Gap Direction Correction

Recent advancements in machine learning have improved performance while also increasing computational demands. While federated and distributed setups address these issues, their structure is vulnerable to malicious influences. In this paper, we address a specific threat, Byzantine attacks, where compromised clients inject adversarial updates to derail global convergence. We combine the trust scores concept with trial function methodology to dynamically filter outliers. Our methods address the critical limitations of previous approaches, allowing functionality even when Byzantine nodes are in the majority. Moreover, our algorithms adapt to widely used scaled methods like Adam and RMSProp, as well as practical scenarios, including local training and partial participation. We validate the robustness of our methods by conducting extensive experiments on both public datasets and private ECG data collected from medical institutions. Furthermore, we provide a broad theoretical analysis of our algorithms and their extensions to aforementioned practical setups. The convergence guarantees of our methods are comparable to those of classical algorithms developed without Byzantine interference.

Bant: Byzantine Antidote via Trial Function and Trust Scores

By providing a standardized interface for LLM agents to interact with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the modern autonomous agent ecosystem. However, it creates novel attack surfaces due to untrusted external tools. While prior work has focused on attacks injected through external tool outputs, we investigate a more fundamental vulnerability: Tool Poisoning, where malicious instructions are embedded within a tool's metadata at the registration stage. To date, this threat has been primarily demonstrated through isolated cases, lacking a systematic, large-scale evaluation. 

We introduce MCPTox, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate agent robustness against Tool Poisoning in realistic MCP settings. MCPTox is constructed upon 45 live, real-world MCP servers and 353 authentic tools. To achieve this, we design three distinct attack templates to generate a comprehensive suite of 1497 malicious test cases by few-shot learning, covering 10 categories of potential risks. Our evaluation on 20 prominent LLM agents setting reveals a widespread vulnerability to Tool Poisoning, with GPT-o1-mini, achieving an attack success rate of 72.8\%. We find that more capable models are often more susceptible, as the attack exploits their superior instruction-following abilities.
Finally, the failure case analysis reveals that agents rarely refuse these attacks, with the highest refused rate (Claude-3.7-Sonnet) less than 3\%, demonstrating that existing safety alignment is ineffective against malicious actions that use legitimate tools for unauthorized operation. Our findings create a crucial empirical baseline for understanding and mitigating this widespread threat, and we release MCPTox for the development of verifiably safer AI agents.

MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning on Real-World MCP Servers

Video shadow detection confronts two entwined difficulties: distinguishing shadows from complex backgrounds and modeling dynamic shadow deformations under varying illumination. To address shadow-background ambiguity, we leverage linguistic priors through the proposed Vision-language Match Module (VMM) and a Dark-aware Semantic Block (DSB), extracting text-guided features to explicitly differentiate shadows from dark objects. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive mask reweighting to downweight penumbra regions during training and apply edge masks at the final decoder stage for better supervision. For temporal modeling of variable shadow shapes, we propose a Tokenized Temporal Block (TTB) that decouples spatiotemporal learning. TTB summarizes cross-frame shadow semantics into learnable temporal tokens, enabling efficient sequence encoding with minimal computation overhead. Comprehensive Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time inference efficiency.

DTTNet: Improving Video Shadow Detection via Dark-Aware Guidance and Tokenized Temporal Modeling

Due to the emergency and homogenization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology development, transformer-based foundation models have revolutionized scientific applications, such as drug discovery, materials research, and astronomy. However, seismic data presents unique characteristics that require specialized processing techniques for pretraining foundation models in seismic contexts with high- and low-frequency features playing crucial roles. Existing vision transformers (ViTs) with sequential tokenization ignore the intrinsic pattern and fail to grasp both the high- and low-frequency seismic information efficiently and effectively.
This work introduces a novel adaptive two-grid foundation model training strategy (\modelname) with Hilbert encoding specifically tailored for seismogram data, leveraging the hierarchical structures inherent in seismic data. Specifically, our approach employs spectrum decomposition to separate high- and low-frequency components and utilizes hierarchical Hilbert encoding to represent the data effectively.
Moreover, observing the frequency principle observed in ViTs, we propose an adaptive training strategy that initially emphasizes coarse-level information and then progressively refines the model's focus on fine-level features. 
Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our training methods. This research highlights the importance of data encoding and training strategies informed by the distinct characteristics of high- and low-frequency features in seismic images, ultimately contributing to the enhancement of visual seismic foundation models pretraining.

Synergizing Multigrid Algorithms with Vision Transformer: A Novel Approach to Enhance the Seismic Foundation Model

Computational humor is a frontier for creating advanced and engaging natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as sophisticated dialogue systems. 
While previous studies have benchmarked the humor capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they have often relied on single-dimensional evaluations, such as judging whether something is simply ``funny.'' 
This paper argues that a multifaceted understanding of humor is necessary and addresses this gap by systematically evaluating LLMs through the lens of Oogiri, a form of Japanese improvisational comedy games.
To achieve this, we expanded upon existing Oogiri datasets with data from new sources and then augmented the collection with Oogiri responses generated by LLMs. 
We then manually annotated this expanded collection with 5-point absolute ratings across six dimensions: Novelty, Clarity, Relevance, Intelligence, Empathy, and Overall Funniness. 
Using this dataset, we assessed the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs on two core tasks: their ability to generate creative Oogiri responses and their ability to evaluate the funniness of responses using a six-dimensional evaluation. 
Our results show that while LLMs can generate responses at a level between low- and mid-tier human performance, they exhibit a notable lack of Empathy. 
This deficit in Empathy helps explain their failure to replicate human humor assessment. 
Correlation analyses of human and model evaluation data further reveal a fundamental divergence in evaluation criteria: LLMs prioritize Novelty, whereas humans prioritize Empathy. 
We release our annotated corpus to the community to pave the way for the development of more emotionally intelligent and sophisticated conversational agents.

Assessing the Capabilities of LLMs in Humor: A Multi-dimensional Analysis of Oogiri Generation and Evaluation

Emojis are globally used non-verbal cues in digital communication, and extensive research has examined how large language models (LLMs) understand and utilize emojis across contexts. While usually associated with friendliness or playfulness, it is observed that emojis may trigger toxic content generation in LLMs. Motivated by such a observation, we aim to investigate: *(1) whether emojis can clearly enhance the toxicity generation in LLMs and (2) how to interpret this phenomenon.* We begin with a comprehensive exploration of emoji-triggered LLM toxicity generation by automating the construction of prompts with emojis to subtly express toxic intent. Experiments across 5 mainstream languages on 7 famous LLMs along with jailbreak tasks demonstrate that prompts with emojis could easily induce toxicity generation. To understand this phenomenon, we conduct model-level interpretations spanning semantic cognition, sequence generation and tokenization, suggesting that emojis can act as a heterogeneous semantic channel to bypass the safety mechanisms. To pursue deeper insights, we further probe the pre-training corpus and uncover potential correlation between the emoji-related data polution with the toxicity generation behaviors. Supplementary materials provide our implementation code and data. (Warning: This paper contains potentially sensitive contents)

When Smiley Turns Hostile: Interpreting How Emojis Trigger LLMs’ Toxicity

Graph neural networks (GNNs) face dual challenges of limited structural expressiveness and opaque decision-making processes. Recent research on Subgraph Neural Networks (SGNNs) enhance model expressiveness through subgraph ensembles. However, their reliance on predefined sampling strategies leads to poor interpretability and computational inefficiency. Meanwhile, post-hoc GNN explainers enhance model interpretability but still struggle to translate their explanations into model improvements. This paper presents a novel framework that fundamentally bridges this gap by developing SGNNs with intrinsic interpretability. Our key innovation lies in constructing a self-interpretable architecture where the explanation generation mechanism is organically integrated with the prediction process. Our proposed Self-Interpretable SGNN introduces a reinforcement walk exploration (RWE-SGNN) as its data-driven sampling strategy, which can dynamically extract discriminative substructures during model training. This reinforcement walk exploration module not only provides inherent interpretability, but also enables: (1) Efficient substructure extraction via walk-based exploration with less candidate number and simper embedding than subgraph generation; (2) Provable equivalence to traditional subgraph enumeration methods with polynomial complexity reduction. Our numerical evaluations on molecular property prediction and social network analysis tasks show accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art GNNs, with case studies validating that the automatically identified subgraphs align with domain-specific knowledge.

Self-Interpretable Subgraph Neural Network with Deep Reinforcement Walk Exploration

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability for intelligent agents, yet remains challenging in partially observable environments where navigation instructions can be difficult to interpret. However, existing tasks only provide unimodal instructions, which are ambiguous in complex multimodal environments with multiple similar objects, and may result in misinterpretation and navigation failure. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MINav, a novel task where the navigation path is precisely described by a multimodal instruction. The instruction provides multimodal cues, including object categories, RGB images, language descriptions, and auditory descriptions, which help the agent to disambiguate and ground objects in the environment and navigate effectively. We further construct a large-scale dataset of 43.9K navigation episodes using a two-stage pipeline that first annotates multimodal references of objects and then synthesizes diverse multimodal instructions. We find that existing methods struggle on MINav task, indicating substantial room for improvement in agents' multimodal grounding. To address this, we propose NaVLA$^2$, a vision-language-audio-action model that additionally integrates spatial audio and employs a CoThinkAct module to jointly generate high-level reasoning and consistent low-level actions. Experimental results demonstrate that NaVLA$^2$ significantly outperforms competitive baselines on MINav benchmark. We hope that our proposed MINav and NaVLA$^2$ will facilitate future research toward agents with stronger multimodal understanding and grounding capabilities for navigation.

NaVLA$^2$: A Vision-Language-Audio-Action Model for Multimodal Instruction Navigation

Recent research reveals that a minority of high-entropy tokens significantly influences the reasoning quality of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by this, we propose Prototype Entropy Alignment (PEA), a reinforcement learning framework that models effective reasoning not as a single path, but as a collection of learnable "entropy signatures." PEA identifies these signatures by clustering the uncertainty patterns of expert trajectories into a dynamic set of prototypes. It then rewards the model for aligning its own reasoning process with these evolving targets, creating a self-improving loop. Instead of replacing traditional outcome-based rewards, PEA provides a complementary, process-oriented signal. Our experiments show this synergy is crucial: PEA substantially boosts performance on creative and general reasoning tasks, and when combined with outcome rewards, achieves state-of-the-art results on structured tasks like mathematics. By rewarding alignment with diverse and evolving reasoning structures, PEA offers a robust, verifier-free pathway to enhance the depth and adaptability of LLM reasoning.

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