Singapore

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress, particularly excelling in realistic scenarios; however, their performance degrades notably in imaginative scenarios. These prompts often involve rarely co-occurring concepts with long-distance semantic relationships, falling outside training distributions. Existing methods typically apply test-time scaling for improving video quality, but their fixed search spaces and static reward designs limit adaptability to imaginative scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose ImagerySearch, a dynamic test-time scaling law strategy inspired by imagery that adaptively adjusts the inference search space and reward guided by prompts, effectively enhancing generation quality in imaginative scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce LDT-Bench, the first benchmark targeting long-distance semantic prompts, designed to evaluate the creativity of video generation models. It comprises 2,839 challenging concept pairs from diverse recognition datasets and incorporates an automatic evaluation protocol to assess creative capacity. Extensive experiments on LDT-Bench demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms general generation models and test-time scaling approaches. Additionally, ImagerySearch achieves strong performance on VBench, confirming its effectiveness in improving video generation quality under diverse conditions. We will release LDT-Bench and codes.

AAAI 2026

ImagerySearch: Adaptive Test-Time Search for Video Generation Beyond Semantic Dependency Constraints

video generation; test time scaling law; long semantic distance

## 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

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.

Graph-based clustering algorithms aim to construct an affinity graph that accurately captures the intrinsic structure of a dataset. To achieve this goal, these algorithms often use the k-nearest-neighbor (k-nn) method to build a graph regularizer for the required affinity graph, enabling it to have a grouping effect. However, due to the complex nature of real-world data, the k-nn method often fails to capture the true neighborhood relationships of a dataset, which in turn limits the quality of the learned affinity graph. Motivated by the insight that a learned affinity graph itself can more effectively reflect the underlying data structure, we propose a new graph-based clustering framework, termed Self-learned Graph Regression (SGR). Unlike traditional approaches, SGR constructs its graph regularizer directly from the affinity graph being learned, allowing the graph to adaptively capture more accurate structural information. To solve the proposed problem, we develop an optimization algorithm along with an acceleration strategy. We further analyze the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Extensive clustering experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art graph-based clustering algorithms. The codes of SGR are available at \url{https://github.com/weilyshmtu/SGR}.

Clustering with Self-Learned Graph Regression

Diffusion models have shown superior performance in real-world video super-resolution (VSR). However, the slow processing speeds and heavy resource consumption of diffusion models hinder their practical application and deployment. Quantization offers a potential solution for compressing the VSR model. Nevertheless, quantizing VSR models is challenging due to their temporal characteristics and high fidelity requirements. To address these issues, we propose QuantVSR, an effective low-bit quantization model for real-world VSR. We propose a spatio-temporal complexity aware (STCA) mechanism, where we first utilize the calibration dataset to measure both spatial and temporal complexities for each layer. Based on these statistics, we allocate layer-specific ranks to the low-rank full-precision (FP) auxiliary branch. Subsequently, we jointly refine the FP and low-bit branches to achieve simultaneous optimization. In addition, we propose a learnable bias alignment (LBA) module to reduce the biased quantization errors. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method obtains comparable performance with the FP model and significantly outperforms recent leading low-bit quantization methods. All models and results will be made public.

QuantVSR: Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Real-World Video Super-Resolution

Egocentric point tracking aims to localize points on object surfaces from a first-person perspective and serves as a critical step toward embodied intelligence. Recent methods rely on video input, tracking query points through feature matching across consecutive frames. 
However, these methods struggle in highly dynamic settings—a common challenge in first-person perspectives, where the head-mounted camera undergoes frequent and abrupt rotations, resulting in high angular velocities, motion blur, and large inter-frame displacements.
In contrast, event cameras capture motion at microsecond temporal resolution, naturally avoiding blur and delivering low-latency, high-fidelity cues crucial for egocentric point tracking.
Moreover, rapid egocentric motion disrupts local smoothness, breaking the assumption that spatially adjacent regions share similar motion. Event dynamics expose global motion trends, guiding coherent modeling and consistent feature flow.
Therefore, this paper proposes a mamba-based tracking framework that constructs feature modeling paths aligned with the dominant motion trend extracted from events, and modulates feature propagation along these paths based on local motion intensity, enhancing stability by suppressing unreliable signals and emphasizing consistent cues.
Additionally, a motion-adaptive suppression module enhances temporal robustness by adaptively suppressing correlation features based on motion intensity variations, mitigating the effects of intensity fluctuations and partial observability.
To facilitate research in this domain, a multimodal dataset named DVS-EgoPoints with both events and videos for egocentric point tracking is collected. Experiments on the DVS-EgoPoints dataset and a simulation benchmark demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, especially under challenging motion and occlusion conditions.

E-MaT:Event-oriented Mamba for Egocentric Point Tracking

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has advanced significantly with high-capacity foundation models like DINOv2, achieving remarkable performance. Nonetheless, their substantial computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices impractical. In this paper, we introduce an efficient asymmetric VPR framework that incorporates a high-capacity gallery model for offline feature extraction with a lightweight query network for online processing. A key challenge in this setting is ensuring compatibility between these heterogeneous networks, which conventional approaches address through computationally expensive k-NN-based compatible training. To overcome this, we propose a geographical memory bank that structures gallery features using geolocation metadata inherent in VPR databases, eliminating the need for exhaustive k-NN computations. Additionally, we introduce an implicit embedding augmentation technique that enhances the query network to model feature variations despite its limited capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only significantly reduces computational costs but also outperforms existing asymmetric retrieval techniques, establishing a new aspect for VPR in resource-limited environments.

Towards Test-time Efficient Visual Place Recognition via Asymmetric Query Processing

How far are deep models from real-world video anomaly understanding (VAU)? Current works typically emphasize on detecting unexpected occurrences deviated from normal patterns or comprehending anomalous events with interpretable descriptions. However, they exhibit only a superficial comprehension of real-world anomalies, with limited breadth in complex principles and subtle context that distinguish the anomalies from normalities, e.g., climbing cliffs with safety gear vs. without it. To this end, we introduce CueBench, the first of its kind Benchmark, devoted to Context-aware video anomalies within a Unified Evaluation framework. We comprehensively establish an event-centric hierarchical taxonomy that anchors two core event types: 14 conditional and 18 absolute anomaly events, defined by their refined semantics from diverse contexts across 174 scenes and 198 attributes. Based on this, we propose to unify and benchmark context-aware VAU with various challenging tasks across recognition, temporal grounding, detection, and anticipation. This also serves as a rigorous and fair probing evaluation suite for generative-discriminative as well as generalized-specialized vision-language models (VLMs). To address the challenges underlying CueBench, we further develop Cue-R1 based on R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning with verifiable, task-aligned, and hierarchy-refined rewards in a unified generative manner. Extensive results on CueBench reveal that, existing VLMs are still far from satisfactory real-world anomaly understanding, while our Cue-R1 surpasses these state-of-the-art approaches by over 24% on average.

CueBench: Advancing Unified Understanding of Context-Aware Video Anomalies in Real-World

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables agents to navigate in complex environments by following natural language instructions grounded in visual observations. Although most existing work has focused on ground-based robots or outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), indoor UAV-based VLN remains underexplored, despite its relevance to real-world applications such as inspection, delivery, and search-and-rescue in confined spaces. 
To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV}, a novel benchmark and method specifically tailored for VLN with indoor UAVs. We begin by curating over 1,000 diverse and structurally rich 3D indoor scenes from the Habitat simulator. Within these environments, we simulate realistic UAV flight dynamics to collect diverse 3D navigation trajectories manually, further enriched through data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we design an automated annotation pipeline to generate natural language instructions of varying granularity for each trajectory. This process yields over 16,000 high-quality trajectories, comprising the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLN} subset, which focuses on long-horizon VLN. 
To support short-horizon planning, we segment long trajectories into sub-trajectories by selecting semantically salient keyframes and regenerating concise instructions, forming the \textbf{IndoorUAV-VLA} subset. 
Finally, we introduce \textbf{IndoorUAV-Agent}, a novel navigation model designed for our benchmark, leveraging task decomposition and multimodal reasoning.
We hope IndoorUAV serves as a valuable resource to advance research on vision-language embodied AI in the indoor aerial navigation domain.

IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments

While recent 3D head avatar creation methods attempt to animate facial dynamics, they often fail to capture personalized details, limiting realism and expressiveness.
To fill this gap, we present DipGuava (Disentangled and Personalized Gaussian UV Avatar), a novel 3D Gaussian head avatar creation method that successfully generates avatars with personalized attributes from monocular video.
DipGuava is the first method to explicitly disentangle facial appearance into two complementary components, trained in a structured two-stage pipeline that significantly reduces learning ambiguity and enhances reconstruction fidelity.
In the first stage, we learn a stable geometry-driven base appearance that captures global facial structure and coarse expression-dependent variations.
In the second stage, the personalized residual details not captured in the first stage are predicted, including high-frequency components and nonlinearly varying features such as wrinkles and subtle skin deformations.
These components are fused via dynamic appearance fusion that integrates residual details after deformation, ensuring spatial and semantic alignment.
This disentangled design enables DipGuava to generate photorealistic, identity-preserving avatars, consistently outperforming prior methods in both visual quality and quantitative performance, as demonstrated in extensive experiments.

DipGuava: Disentangling Personalized Gaussian Features for 3D Head Avatars from Monocular Video

Weakly supervised phrase localization (WSPL) aims to localize visual objects mentioned by given phrases, but learning without human-annotated bounding boxes. Previous works struggle in multi-object scenarios, where objects in the background often simultaneously appear with the target objects. To this end, we propose a Diffusion-Assisted PrOgressive learning framework (i.e., DAPO) for WSPL task in this paper.
Specifically, we score the difficulty of training samples based on the quantity of objects and the level of semantic alignment. These samples are then incorporated progressively during training, in an order by their difficulty scores. To address the sample imbalance problem, we propose a Generation-Assisted Tuning (GAT) method for the grounding network. First, to enrich the samples from few-object scenarios, we leverage Stable Diffusion (SD) to generate images with phrases. Second, we introduce an attention-driven scheme to guide SD's attention on mentioned objects. Finally, we design a diffusion-guided loss, which helps the grounding network learn the objects' layouts. Extensive experiments show that our DAPO framework outperforms the strong baselines on benchmark datasets. The source code will be publicly available on GitHub after the double-blind phase.

Diffusion-Assisted Progressive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase Localization

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert human speech content into corresponding text. In conversational scenarios, effectively utilizing context can enhance its accuracy. Large Language Models' (LLMs) exceptional long-context understanding and reasoning abilities enable LLM-based ASR (LLM-ASR) to leverage historical context for recognizing conversational speech, which has a high degree of contextual relevance. However, existing conversational LLM-ASR methods use a fixed number of preceding utterances or the entire conversation history as context, resulting in significant ASR confusion and computational costs due to massive irrelevant and redundant information. This paper proposes a multi-modal retrieval-and-selection method named MARS that augments conversational LLM-ASR by enabling it to retrieve and select the most relevant acoustic and textual historical context for the current utterance. Specifically, multi-modal retrieval obtains a set of candidate historical contexts, each exhibiting high acoustic or textual similarity to the current utterance. Multi-modal selection calculates the acoustic and textual similarities for each retrieved candidate historical context and, by employing our proposed near-ideal ranking method to consider both similarities, selects the best historical context. Evaluations on the Interspeech 2025 Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model Challenge dataset show that the LLM-ASR, when trained on only 1.5K hours of data and equipped with the MARS, outperforms the state-of-the-art top-ranking system trained on 179K hours of data.

Hearing More with Less: Multi-Modal Retrieval-and-Selection Augmented Conversational LLM-Based ASR

With the rapid advancement of deep learning, drug target interaction (DTI) prediction has seen substantial performance enhancements. However, existing methodologies face a critical, yet unaddressed challenge, i.e., the $\textbf{Modality Reliability Gap}$. Such a gap arises from the unpredictable variance in the informativeness and reliability of 1D sequence versus 3D structural data across different drug-target pairs, critically limiting model robustness and domain generalization capabilities.
To overcome it, we introduce $\textbf{DrugCMF}$, a novel $\textbf{Drug}$-Target interaction prediction method via $\textbf{C}$onfidence-aware $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{F}$usion framework designed specifically to bridge the Modality Reliability Gap. Specifically, the DrugCMF employs a four-stage approach: (1) it extracts rich features by utilizing four pre-trained models to obtain token-level embeddings from both 1D sequences and 3D structures. (2) it preserves modality informativeness by independently learning interaction patterns within each modality through a Token-level Interaction module. (3) it explicitly quantifies the reliability gap by employing a novel confidence estimation mechanism to dynamically learn weights for each modality. (4) it bridges the gap by using these confidence scores to guide a learnable cross-modal fusion module, adaptively fusing information from the most trustworthy source.
By methodically addressing the Modality Reliability Gap, DrugCMF significantly outperforms SOTA methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and robustness (Our Code is available in the supplementary materials).

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