Singapore

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate decoding by storing full-layer states, yet impose substantial memory usage that limit long-context applications. Our analysis of attention patterns in dLLMs reveals persistent cross-layer sparsity, with pivotal tokens remaining salient across decoding steps and low-relevance tokens staying unimportant, motivating selective cache eviction. We propose Sparse-dLLM, the first training-free framework integrating dynamic cache eviction with sparse attention via delayed bidirectional sparse caching. By leveraging the stability of token saliency over steps, it retains critical tokens and dynamically evicts unimportant prefix/suffix entries using an attention-guided strategy. Extensive experiments on LLaDA and Dream series demonstrate Sparse-dLLM achieves up to 10$\times$ higher throughput than vanilla dLLMs, with comparable performance and similar peak memory costs, outperforming previous methods in efficiency and effectiveness.

AAAI 2026

Sparse-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion LLMs with Dynamic Cache Eviction

ml: efficient ml

nlp: (large) language models

nlp: generation

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

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.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) extends traditional closed-set segmentation by enabling pixel-wise annotation for both seen and unseen categories using arbitrary textual descriptions. While existing methods leverage vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, their reliance on image-level pretraining often results in imprecise spatial alignment, leading to mismatched segmentations in ambiguous or cluttered scenes. However, most existing approaches lack strong object priors and region-level constraints, which can lead to object hallucination or missed detections, further degrading performance. To address these challenges, we propose LoGoSeg—an efficient single-stage framework that integrates three key innovations: (i) an object existence prior that dynamically weights relevant categories through global image-text similarity, effectively reducing hallucinations; (ii) a region-aware alignment module that establishes precise region-level visual-textual correspondences; and (iii) a dual-stream fusion mechanism that optimally combines local structural information with global semantic context. Unlike prior works, LoGoSeg eliminates the need for external mask proposals, additional backbones, or extra datasets, ensuring efficiency. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks (A-847, PC-459, A-150, PC-59, PAS-20, and PAS-20b) demonstrate its competitive performance and strong generalization in open-vocabulary settings.

LoGoSeg: Integrating Local and Global Features for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) task aims at improving contrast while restoring details and textures for images captured in low-light conditions. HVI color space has made significant progress in this task by enabling precise decoupling of chrominance and luminance. However, for the interaction of chrominance and luminance branches, substantial distributional differences between the two branches prevalent in natural images limit complementary feature extraction, and luminance errors are propagated to chrominance channels through the nonlinear parameter. Furthermore, for interaction between different chrominance branches, images with large homogeneous-color regions usually exhibit weak correlation between chrominance branches due to concentrated distributions. Traditional pixel-wise losses exploit strong inter-branch correlations for co-optimization, causing gradient conflicts in weakly correlated regions. Therefore, we propose an Inter-Chrominance and Luminance Interaction (ICLR) framework including a Dual-stream Interaction Enhancement Module (DIEM) and a Covariance Correction Loss (CCL). The DIEM improves the extraction of complementary information from two dimensions, fusion and enhancement, respectively. The CCL utilizes luminance residual statistics to penalize chrominance errors and balances gradient conflicts by constraining chrominance branches covariance. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed ICLR framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

ICLR: Inter-Chrominance and Luminance Interaction for Natural Color Restoration in Low-Light Image Enhancement

Unsupervised 3D object detection leverages heuristic algorithms to discover potential objects, offering a promising route to reduce annotation costs in autonomous driving. Existing approaches mainly generate pseudo labels and refine them through self-training iterations. However, these pseudo-labels are often incorrect at the beginning of training, resulting in misleading the optimization process. Moreover, effectively filtering and refining them remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{OWL}$ for unsupervised 3D object detection by occupancy guided warm-up and large-model priors reasoning. OWL first employs an Occupancy Guided Warm-up (OGW) strategy to initialize the backbone weight with spatial perception capabilities, mitigating the interference of incorrect pseudo-labels on network convergence. Furthermore, OWL introduces an Instance-Cued Reasoning (ICR) module that leverages the prior knowledge of large models to assess pseudo-label quality, enabling precise filtering and refinement. Finally, we design a WAS (Weight-adapted Self-training) strategy to dynamically re-weight pseudo-labels, improving the performance through self-training. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and KITTI demonstrate that OWL outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by over 15.0\% mAP, revealing the effectiveness of our method.

OWL: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection by Occupancy Guided Warm-up and Large Model Priors Reasoning

In supervised learning, traditional image masking faces two key issues: (i) discarded pixels are underutilized, leading to a loss of valuable contextual information; (ii) masking may remove small or critical features, especially in fine-grained tasks.
In contrast, masked image modeling (MIM) has demonstrated that masked regions can be reconstructed from partial input, revealing that even incomplete data can exhibit strong contextual consistency with the original image. This highlights the potential of masked regions as sources of semantic diversity.
Motivated by this, we revisit the image masking approach, proposing to treat masked content as auxiliary knowledge rather than ignored. Based on this, we proposed MaskAnyNet, which combines masking with a relearning mechanism to exploit both visible and masked information. It can be easily extended to any model with an additional branch to jointly learn from the recomposed masked region. This approach leverages the semantic diversity of masked regions to enrich features and preserve fine-grained details. Experiments on CNN and Transformer backbones show consistent gains across multiple benchmarks. Further analysis confirms that the proposed method improves semantic diversity through the reuse of masked content.

MaskAnyNet: Rethinking Masked Image Regions as Valuable Information in Supervised Learning

We study experimentation under endogenous network interference. Interference patterns are mediated by an endogenous graph, where edges can be formed or eliminated as a result of treatment. We show that conventional estimators are biased in these circumstances, and present a class of unbiased, consistent and asymptotically normal estimators of total treatment effects in the presence of such interference. We show via simulation that our estimator outperforms existing estimators in the literature. Our results apply both to bipartite experimentation, in which the units of analysis and measurement differ, and the standard network experimentation case, in which they are the same.

Experimentation on Endogenous Graphs

We present Hexaïssa, a novel framework for adaptive chess engine routing that formulates expert selection as a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) problem. Hexaïssa learns a gating policy that dynamically selects among heterogeneous state-of-the-art engines—such as Stockfish, LCZero, and Obsidian—based on the tactical and strategic complexity of each board state. This adaptivity enables stronger play and more efficient computation than any fixed engine or static configuration. However, training such a gating policy is fundamentally challenging due to sparse optimization signals and long-horizon credit assignment in chess games. To address these challenges, we introduce a score-based inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) method that models expert engine trajectories as samples from a latent distribution over optimal behaviors. By recovering the Stein score function of this distribution via stochastic differential equations (SDEs), we infer dense, per-move reward signals consistent with potential-based IRL. These latent rewards allow efficient training of the gating network without requiring additional environment interaction or human supervision. Empirical results on standard chess benchmarks demonstrate that Hexaïssa significantly outperforms individual engines, conventional MoE models, and IRL baselines.

Hexaïssa: Standing on Giants’ Shoulders—Routing the Best Chess Engines with Mixture-of-Experts and Latent Reward Learning

Driven by advances in GANs and diffusion models, deepfake content has reached an unprecedented level of photorealism, causing detectors to deteriorate once they leave their training domain. Most prior studies adopt CLIP as the backbone of an image-level binary classifier, yet overlook CLIP’s core strength: text-to-image semantic alignment. Moreover, captions generated by CLIP-CAP lack sufficient high-level semantics to distinguish between authentic and manipulated faces. Deepfake generators often fail to maintain semantic coherence, resulting in contradictions that traditional visual models cannot capture. Existing approaches also intermingle all samples during training and thus lack a systematic, difficulty-aware curriculum. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Semantic- and Frequency-Enhanced (SAFE) deepfake detection, a two-component framework: 1) Semantic-enhanced multimodal alignment. Authenticity cues are injected into CLIP-CAP captions, and low-rank LoRA fine-tuning is applied to CLIP’s visual branch, yielding dual supervision for text–image alignment and forgery discrimination. 2) Dual-score curriculum learning. Fourier Correlation Variance (FCV) measures local spectral consistency and, combined with the loss value, is transformed into a difficulty score that ranks training samples from easy to hard, reducing training time by 23.3\% and enhancing generalization. SAFE attains state-of-the-art performance on several cross-dataset and cross-manipulation benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that semantic enhancement, LoRA fine-tuning, and dual-score curriculum are complementary, jointly delivering substantial gains in open-set generalization.

SAFE: Semantic- and Frequency-Enhanced Curriculum for Cross-Domain Deepfake Detection

Text-to-image diffusion models utilize cross-attention to integrate textual information into the visual latent space, yet the transformation from text embeddings to latent features remains largely unexplored.
We provide a mechanistic analysis of the output-value (OV) circuits within cross-attention layers through spectral analysis via singular value decomposition.
Our analysis reveals that semantic concepts are encoded in low-dimensional subspaces spanned by singular vectors in OV circuits across cross-attention heads.
To verify this, we intervene on concept-related components in the diffusion process, demonstrating that intervention on identified spectral components affects conceptual changes.
We further validate these findings by examining visual outputs of isolated subspaces and their alignment with text embedding space.
Through this mechanistic understanding, we demonstrate that only nullifying these spectral components can achieve targeted concept removal with performance comparable to existing methods while providing interpretability.
Our work reveals how cross-attention layers encode semantic concepts in spectral subspaces of OV circuits, providing mechanistic insights and enabling precise concept manipulation without retraining.

Mechanistic Dissection of Cross-Attention Subspaces in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution intends to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) scans by leveraging structural information present in HR reference images acquired with different contrasts. This technique enhances anatomical detail and soft tissue differentiation, which is vital for early diagnosis and clinical decision-making. However, inherent contrasts disparities between modalities pose fundamental challenges in effectively utilizing reference image textures to guide target image reconstruction, often resulting in suboptimal feature integration. To address this issue, we propose a dual-prompt expert network based on a convolutional dictionary feature decoupling (CD-DPE) strategy for multi-contrast MRI super-resolution. Specifically, we introduce an iterative convolutional dictionary feature decoupling module (CD-FDM) to separate features into cross-contrast and intra-contrast components, thereby reducing redundancy and interference. To fully integrate these features, a novel dual-prompt feature fusion expert module (DP-FFEM) is proposed. This module uses a frequency prompt to guide the selection of relevant reference features for incorporation into the target image, while an adaptive routing prompt determines the optimal method for fusing reference and target features to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate that CD-DPE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstructing fine details.

CD-DPE: Dual-Prompt Expert Network Based on Convolutional Dictionary Feature Decoupling for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution

High-fidelity 3D meshes can be tokenized into one-dimension (1D) sequences and directly modeled using autoregressive approaches for faces and vertices. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient resource utilization, resulting in slow inference and the ability to handle only small-scale sequences, which severely constrains the expressible structural details.
We introduce the Latent Autoregressive Network (LANE), which incorporates compact autoregressive dependencies in the generation process, achieving a 6× improvement in maximum generatable sequence length compared to existing methods. 
To further accelerate inference, we propose the Adaptive Computation Graph Reconfiguration (AdaGraph) strategy, which effectively overcomes the efficiency bottleneck of traditional serial inference through spatiotemporal decoupling in the generation process.
Experimental validation demonstrates that LANE achieves superior performance across generation speed, structural detail, and geometric consistency, providing an effective solution for high-quality 3D mesh generation.

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