Singapore

Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter at complex planning tasks that require exploration and self-correction, as their linear reasoning process struggles to recover from early mistakes. While search algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) can explore alternatives, they are often ineffective when guided by sparse rewards and fail to leverage the rich semantic capabilities of LLMs. We introduce SPIRAL (Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search), a novel framework that embeds a cognitive architecture of three specialized LLM agents into an MCTS loop. SPIRAL&#39;s key contribution is its integrated planning pipeline where a Planner proposes creative next steps, a Simulator grounds the search by predicting realistic outcomes, and a Critic provides dense reward signals through reflection. This synergy transforms MCTS from a brute-force search into a guided, self-correcting reasoning process. On the DailyLifeAPIs and HuggingFace datasets, SPIRAL consistently outperforms the default Chain-of-Thought planning method and other state-of-the-art agents. More importantly, it substantially surpasses other state-of-the-art agents; for example, SPIRAL achieves 83.6% overall accuracy on DailyLifeAPIs, an improvement of over 16 percentage points against the next-best search framework, while also demonstrating superior token efficiency. Our work demonstrates that structuring LLM reasoning as a guided, reflective, and grounded search process yields more robust and efficient autonomous planners. The source code for all experiments is available in the supplemental materials for reproducibility.

AAAI 2026

SPIRAL: Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search

monte carlo tree search

automated planning

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter at complex planning tasks that require exploration and self-correction, as their linear reasoning process struggles to recover from early mistakes. While search algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) can explore alternatives, they are often ineffective when guided by sparse rewards and fail to leverage the rich semantic capabilities of LLMs. We introduce SPIRAL (Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search), a novel framework that embeds a cognitive architecture of three specialized LLM agents into an MCTS loop. SPIRAL's key contribution is its integrated planning pipeline where a Planner proposes creative next steps, a Simulator grounds the search by predicting realistic outcomes, and a Critic provides dense reward signals through reflection. This synergy transforms MCTS from a brute-force search into a guided, self-correcting reasoning process. On the DailyLifeAPIs and HuggingFace datasets, SPIRAL consistently outperforms the default Chain-of-Thought planning method and other state-of-the-art agents. More importantly, it substantially surpasses other state-of-the-art agents; for example, SPIRAL achieves 83.6% overall accuracy on DailyLifeAPIs, an improvement of over 16 percentage points against the next-best search framework, while also demonstrating superior token efficiency. Our work demonstrates that structuring LLM reasoning as a guided, reflective, and grounded search process yields more robust and efficient autonomous planners. The source code for all experiments is available in the supplemental materials for reproducibility.

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.

Unlike traditional object detection, moving infrared small target detection is highly challenging due to tiny target size and limited labeled samples. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on the pure-vision features usually by fully-supervised learning, heavily relying on extensive high-cost manual annotations. Moreover, they almost have not concerned the potentials of multi-modal (e.g., vision and text) learning yet. To address these issues, inspired by prevalent vision-language models, we propose the first semi-supervised vision-language (SeViL) framework with adaptive text prompt guiding. Breaking through traditional pure-vision modality, it takes text prompts as prior knowledge to adaptively enhance target regions and then filter the low-quality pseudo-labels generated on unlabeled data. In the meanwhile, we employ an adaptive cross-modal masking strategy to align text and vision features, promoting cross-modal deep interactions. Remarkably, our extensive experiments on three public datasets (DAUB, ITSDT-15K and IRDST) verify that our new scheme could outperform other semi-supervised ones, and even achieve comparable performance to fully-supervised state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, with only 10% labeled training samples. Source codes will be publicly available after acceptance.

SeViL: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Learning with Text Prompt Guiding for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

High quality datasets are critical for training reliable machine learning models, yet data faults caused by insufficient annotation expertise or malicious poisoning attacks remain prevalent. Traditional classifier based methods rely on manually curated subsets for fault detection, but their limited scale frequently leads to model overfitting. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) based methods offer promising detection capabilities, their few-shot learning limitations hinder generalization in domain specific tasks. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering (MISF), a novel framework that combines the strengths of MLLM based initialization and iterative data refinement. Our framework initializes the detection model with MLLM generated synthetic images and a curated clean subset, then iteratively refines it by progressively selecting high certainty clean samples, improving both domain adaptation and detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on RESISC45 and Oxford-IIIT Pets datasets demonstrate that MISF effectively identifies data faults, outperforming existing approaches. MISF provides a robust, scalable solution for improving dataset quality in specialized domains.

MISF: MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering for Data Fault Detection

Appearance-based gaze estimation, aiming to predict accurate 3D gaze direction from a single facial image, has made promising progress in recent years. However, most methods suffer from heavy performance degradation when facing across-domain evaluation due to gaze-irrelevant factor interference, such as expressions, wearables, and image quality. To alleviate this problem, we present a novel Hybrid-domain Adaptative Representation Learning (shorted by HARL) framework that exploits multi-source hybrid datasets to learn robust gaze representation. More specifically, we propose to disentangle gaze-relevant representation from low-quality facial images by aligning features extracted from high-quality near-eye images in an unsupervised domain-adaptation manner, which hardly requires any computational or inference costs. Additionally, we also analyze the effect of head-pose and design a simple yet efficient sparse graph fusion module to explore the inner geometric constraint between gaze direction and head-pose, which leads to dense and robust gaze representation. Extensive experiments on EyeDiap, MPIIFaceGaze, and Gaze360 datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of $\textbf{5.02}^{\circ}$ and $\textbf{3.36}^{\circ}$, and $\textbf{9.26}^{\circ}$ respectively, and present completing performances through cross-datasets evaluation.

Hybrid-Domain Adaptative Representation Learning for Gaze Estimation

Sparse-view 3D Gaussian splatting seeks to render high-quality novel views of 3D scenes from a limited set of input images. While recent pose-free feed-forward methods leveraging pre-trained 3D priors have achieved impressive results, most of them rely on full fine-tuning of large Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones and incur substantial GPU costs.
In this work, we introduce MuSASplat, a novel framework that dramatically reduces the computational burden of training pose-free feed-forward 3D Gaussian splats models with little compromise of rendering quality. Central to our approach is a lightweight Multi-Scale Adapter that enables efficient fine-tuning of ViT-based architectures with only a small fraction of training parameters. This design avoids the prohibitive GPU overhead associated with previous full-model adaptation techniques while maintaining high fidelity in novel view synthesis, even with very sparse input views. In addition, we introduce a Feature Fusion Aggregator that integrates features across input views effectively and efficiently. Unlike widely adopted memory banks, the Feature Fusion Aggregator ensures consistent geometric integration across input views and meanwhile mitigates the memory usage, training complexity, and computational costs significantly.
Extensive experiments across diverse datasets show that MuSASplat achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality but has significantly reduced parameters and training resource requirements as compared with existing methods.

MuSASplat: Efficient Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splats via Lightweight Multi-Scale Adaptation

Understanding multi-page documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. To support this, we design a rigorous two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy that enables effective training with limited supervision. Using this pipeline, we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, a benchmark with 8.6k QA examples over full scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks while maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks.

DocR1: Evidence Page-Guided GRPO for Multi-Page Document Understanding

Streaming free-viewpoint video (FVV) in real-time still faces significant challenges, particularly in training, rendering, and transmission efficiency. Harnessing superior performance of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), recent 3DGS-based FVV methods have achieved notable breakthroughs in both training and rendering. However, the storage requirements of these methods can reach up to $10$MB per frame, making stream FVV in real-time impossible. To address this problem, we propose a novel FVV representation, dubbed StreamSTGS, designed for real-time streaming. StreamSTGS represents a dynamic scene using canonical 3D Gaussians, temporal features, and a deformation field. For high compression efficiency, we encode canonical Gaussian attributes as 2D images and temporal features as a video. This design not only enables real-time streaming, but also inherently supports adaptive bitrate control based on network condition without any extra training. Moreover, we propose a sliding window scheme to aggregate adjacent temporal features to learn local motions, and then introduce a transformer-guided auxiliary training module to learn global motions. On diverse FVV benchmarks, StreamSTGS demonstrates competitive performance on all metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, StreamSTGS increases the PSNR by an average of $1$dB while reducing the average frame size to just $170$KB.

StreamSTGS: Streaming Spatial and Temporal Gaussian Grids for Real-Time Free-Viewpoint Video

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in semi-supervised graph anomaly detection (GAD). While many GNN variants have been developed for this task, they largely focus on advanced message aggregation schemes, leaving the message routing aspect underexplored. We argue that the commonly used broadcast-based routing can also hinder generalization, particularly in the presence of rare and structurally challenging (vertices with a high-degree) anomalies. To address this, we propose Binary Message Passing (BMP), a novel routing paradigm that models the message flow of each vertex as a binary tree (BMP tree), where vanilla graph convolution is decoupled by its left and right subtrees. Each vertex recursively gathers information from neighbors with higher anomaly probabilities within each subtree, thereby amplifying the propagation of anomaly information across the topology. The anomaly probabilities are estimated and updated by the model itself, enabling adaptive, self-supervised routing over iterations. Furthermore, combining multiple BMP trees into a BMP forest provides multi-scale structural context, enhancing the expressiveness of final vertex embeddings. Extensive experiments show that BMP improves detection performance under limited supervision while exhibiting better generalization across structurally diverse anomalies.

Binary Message Passing for Generalizable Semi-Supervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) involves extracting aspect terms from text-image pairs and identifying their sentiments. Most existing tasks consider one fixed sentiment category with explicitly mentioned aspects. However, these tasks seldom consider expressive sentiment categories, implicit aspects, and explainability. To this end, we introduce a novel task of Open-domain Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Reasoning (OX-MABSR). This task enables the prediction of open-vocabulary aspect-sentiment pairs, together with the generation of sentiment explanations and reasoning paths. To benchmark OX-MABSR task, we construct OX-MABSR-Bench, a dataset annotated with explicit and implicit aspects, expressive sentiment categories, as well as perceptual and cognitive two-level explanations. The explanations capture visual and textual cues, including aesthetics, facial expressions, scenes, and textual semantics, together with background and situational knowledge. In addition, we annotate the reasoning paths that trace how the sentiment evolves from surface cues to a deeper contextual understanding. To address OX-MABSR task, we propose MABSR-LLM. Extensive experimental results show our MABSR-LLM outperforms strong baselines. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a unified framework for open-domain and explainable MABSR. The data and code will be made publicly available on GitHub.

OX-MABSR: A Benchmark for Open-domain Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Reasoning

Image restoration (IR) models are typically trained to recover high-quality images using L1 or LPIPS loss. To handle diverse unknown degradations, zero-shot IR methods have also been introduced. However, existing pre-trained and zero-shot IR approaches often fail to align with human preferences, resulting in restored images that may not be favored. This highlights the critical need to enhance restoration quality and adapt flexibly to various image restoration tasks or backbones without requiring model retraining and ideally without labor-intensive preference data collection. In this paper, we propose the first Test-Time Preference Optimization (TTPO) paradigm for image restoration, which enhances perceptual quality, generates preference data on-the-fly, and is compatible with any IR model backbone.
Specifically, we design a training-free, three-stage pipeline:
(i) generate candidate preference images online using diffusion inversion and denoising based on the initially restored image;
(ii) select preferred and dispreferred images using automated preference-aligned metrics or human feedback;
and (iii) use the selected preference images as reward signals to guide the diffusion denoising process, optimizing the restored image to better align with human preferences. Extensive experiments across various image restoration tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed pipeline.

Test-Time Preference Optimization for Image Restoration

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to infer human sentiment by integrating information from multiple modalities such as text, audio, and video. In real-world scenarios, however, the presence of missing modalities and noisy signals significantly hinders the robustness and accuracy of existing models. While prior works have made progress on these issues, they are typically addressed in isolation, limiting overall effectiveness in practical settings. To jointly mitigate the challenges posed by missing and noisy modalities, we propose a framework called Two-stage Modality Denoising and Complementation (TMDC). TMDC comprises two sequential training stages. In the Intra-Modality Denoising Stage, denoised modality-specific and modality-shared representations are extracted from complete data using dedicated denoising modules, reducing the impact of noise and enhancing representational robustness. In the Inter-Modality Complementation Stage, these representations are leveraged to compensate for missing modalities, thereby enriching the available information and further improving robustness. Extensive evaluations on MOSI, MOSEI, and IEMOCAP demonstrate that TMDC consistently achieves superior performance compared to existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art results.

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SeViL: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Learning with Text Prompt Guiding for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

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