Singapore

Existing speech tokenizers typically assign a fixed number of tokens per second, regardless of the varying information density or temporal fluctuations in the speech signal. This uniform token allocation mismatches the intrinsic structure of speech, where information is distributed unevenly over time. To address this, we propose VARSTok, a VAriable-frame-Rate Speech Tokenizer that adapts token allocation based on local feature similarity. VARSTok introduces two key innovations: (1) a temporal-aware density peak clustering algorithm that adaptively segments speech into variable-length units, and (2) a novel implicit duration coding scheme that embeds both content and temporal span into a single token index, eliminating the need for auxiliary duration predictors. Extensive experiments show that VARSTok significantly outperforms strong fixed-rate baselines. Notably, it achieves superior reconstruction naturalness while using up to 23% fewer tokens than a 40 Hz fixed-frame-rate baseline. VARSTok further yields lower word error rates and improved naturalness in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that a fully dynamic, variable-frame-rate acoustic speech tokenizer can be seamlessly integrated into downstream speech language models.

AAAI 2026

Say More with Less: Variable-Frame-Rate Speech Tokenization via Adaptive Clustering and Implicit Duration Coding

nlp: other

nlp: speech

nlp: applications

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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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.

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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.

Multi-view clustering of remote sensing data plays a vital role in Earth observation analysis. Recently, deep graph clustering methods based on contrastive learning have significantly improved feature representation capabilities. However, most existing approaches treat all views equally, neglecting the inherent uniqueness and heterogeneity across views, which often results in two major issues: 1) discriminative features from clustering-friendly views are underexplored; and 2) redundant or noisy information from less informative views can degrade the shared representation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-view graph clustering framework termed CF-MVGC for remote sensing data, which dynamically preserves discriminative features and suppresses redundancy by assessing view affinity. Specifically, we employ a dual-stage representation learning strategy to extract both view-specific discriminative features and cross-view consistent representations. To further exploit and adaptively integrate complementary information across views, we design a progressive feature filtering model that dynamically evaluates view affinity using two novel metrics, i.e., view fidelity index (VFI) and view criticality index (VCI). Based on these assessments, the module adaptively modulates feature update and reset signals, reinforcing informative views while suppressing noisy or redundant ones. Views with high affinity receive strengthened update signals to retain valuable features, while those with low affinity are subjected to enhanced reset operations to eliminate noise and redundancy. The resulting high-quality, discriminative representations lead to improved clustering performance, establishing a positive feedback loop. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of CF-MVGC against its competitors.

Cross-View Progressive Feature Filtering for Multi-View Graph Clustering in Remote Sensing

LiDAR point cloud is essential for autonomous vehicles, but
motion distortions from dynamic objects degrade the data
quality. While previous work has considered distortions
caused by ego motion, distortions caused by other moving
objects remain largely overlooked, leading to errors in
object shape and position. This distortion is particularly
pronounced in high-speed environments such as highways and
in multi-LiDAR configurations, a common setup for heavy
vehicles. To address this challenge, we introduce HiMo, a
pipeline that repurposes scene flow estimation for non-ego
motion compensation, correcting the representation of
dynamic objects in point clouds. During the development of
HiMo, we observed that existing self-supervised scene flow
estimators often produce degenerate or inconsistent
estimates under high-speed distortion. We further propose
SeFlow++, a real-time scene flow estimator that achieves
state-of-the-art performance on both scene flow and motion
compensation. Since well-established motion distortion
metrics are absent in the literature, we introduce two
evaluation metrics: compensation accuracy at a point level
and shape similarity of objects. We validate HiMo through
extensive experiments on Argoverse 2, ZOD and a newly
collected real-world dataset featuring highway driving and
multi-LiDAR-equipped heavy vehicles. Our findings show that
HiMo improves the geometric consistency and visual fidelity
of dynamic objects in LiDAR point clouds, benefiting
downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation and 3D
detection.

HiMo: High-Speed Objects Motion Compensation in Point Clouds

Large language model (LLM)-driven agents are designed to handle a wide range of tasks autonomously. As tasks become increasingly composite, the integration of multiple agents into a graph-structured system offers a promising solution. Recent advances mainly architect the communication order among agents into a specified directed acyclic graph, from which a one-by-one execution can be determined by topological sort. However, sequential architectures restrict the diversity of the information flow, hinder parallel computation, and exhibit vulnerabilities to potential backdoor threats. To overcome underlying shortcomings of sequential structures, we propose a node-wise multi-agent scheme, named message passing multi-agent system (MPAS). Specifically, to parallelize the communication across agents, we extend the message propagation mechanism in graph representation learning to multi-agent scenarios and introduce our individual-epistemic message propagation. To further enhance expressiveness and robustness, we investigate three self-driven message aggregators. To achieve desired working flows, collaborative connections can be optimized without constraints. The experimental results reveal that compared to state-of-the-art sequential designs, MPAS could architect more advanced algorithms in 93.8\% of the evaluations, reduce the average communication time from 84.6 seconds to 14.2 seconds per round on AQuA, and improve resilience against backdoor misinformation injection in 94.4\% tests. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MPAS-2E20.

MPAS: Breaking Sequential Constraints of Multi-Agent Communication Topologies via Individual-Epistemic Message Propagation

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models for video understanding (videoLLMs) have enhanced their capacity to process complex spatiotemporal data. However, challenges such as factual inaccuracies, harmful content, biases, hallucinations, and privacy risks compromise their reliability. This study introduces Trust-videoLLMs, a first comprehensive benchmark evaluating 23 state-of-the-art videoLLMs (5 commercial, 18 open-source) across five critical dimensions: truthfulness, robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy. Comprising 30 tasks with adapted, synthetic, and annotated videos, the framework assesses spatiotemporal risks, temporal consistency and cross-modal impact. Results reveal significant limitations in dynamic scene comprehension, cross-modal perturbation resilience and real-world risk mitigation. While open-source models occasionally outperform, proprietary models generally exhibit superior credibility, though scaling does not consistently improve performance. These findings underscore the need for enhanced training datat diversity and robust multimodal alignment. Trust-videoLLMs provides a publicly available, extensible toolkit for standardized trustworthiness assessments, addressing the critical gap between accuracy-focused benchmarks and demands for robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy.
Code are available at: \emph{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Trust-videoLLMs-0C37}

Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding

This paper studies the problem of minimizing group-level inequity in facility location games on the real line, where agents are partitioned into groups and may act strategically. While most classical objectives focus on minimizing total or maximum individual cost, we consider a fairness-driven objective that minimizes the maximum group effect (Marsh and Schilling 1994), where each group's effect is defined as its total or maximum distance to the nearest facility, weighted by group-specific factors. We show that this formulation generalizes several prominent optimization objectives, including the classical utilitarian (social cost) and egalitarian (maximum cost) objectives Procaccia and Tennenholtz (2009); and two group-fair objectives, maximum total/average group cost, proposed by Zhou, Li, and Chan (2022). 
To minimize the maximum group effect objective, for single-facility case, we propose novel BALANCED mechanism and Major-Phantom mechanism, both of which are strategyproof and provide tight approximation guarantees when considering distinct maximum group effect objectives. Our mechanisms not only resolve the bound gap for group-fairness objectives studied by Zhou, Li, and Chan (2022) but also unify many classical truthful mechanisms with respect to classical optimization objectives. For the two-facility case, we revisit the classical endpoint mechanism in our more generalized scenario and show that the mechanism is powerful to provide tight bounds for two distinct maximum group effect objectives.

Minimizing Inequity in Facility Location Games

Feature caching has recently emerged as a promising method for diffusion model acceleration. It effectively alleviates the inefficiency problem caused by high computational requirements by caching similar features in the inference process of the diffusion model. In this paper, we analyze existing feature caching methods from the perspective of information utilization, and point out that relying solely on historical information will lead to constrained accuracy and speed performance. And we propose a novel paradigm that introduces future information via self-speculation based on the information similarity at the same time step across different iteration times. Based on this paradigm, we present \textit{SpecDiff}, a training-free multi-level feature caching strategy including a cached feature selection algorithm and a multi-level feature classification algorithm. (1) Feature selection algorithm based on self-speculative information. \textit{SpecDiff} determines a dynamic importance score for each token based on self-speculative information and historical information, and performs cached feature selection through the importance score. (2) Multi-level feature classification algorithm based on feature importance scores. \textit{SpecDiff} classifies tokens by leveraging the differences in feature importance scores and introduces a multi-level feature calculation strategy.
Extensive experiments show that \textit{SpecDiff} achieves average 2.80×, 2.74×, and 3.17× speedup with negligible quality loss in Stable Diffusion 3, 3.5, and FLUX compared to RFlow on NVIDIA A800-80GB GPU. By merging speculative and historical information, \textit{SpecDiff} overcomes the speedup-accuracy trade-off bottleneck, pushing the Pareto frontier of speedup and accuracy in the efficient diffusion model inference.

SpecDiff: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Self-Speculation

One crucial factor behind the success of deep learning lies in the implicit bias induced by noise inherent in gradient-based training algorithms. Motivated by empirical observations that training with noisy labels improves model generalization, we delve into the underlying mechanisms behind stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise. Focusing on a two-layer over-parameterized linear network, we analyze the learning dynamics of label noise SGD, unveiling a two-phase learning behavior. In Phase I, the magnitudes of model weights progressively diminish, and the model escapes the lazy regime; enters the rich regime. In Phase II, the alignment between model weights and the ground-truth interpolator increases, and the model eventually converges. Our analysis highlights the critical role of label noise in driving the transition from the lazy to the rich regime and minimally explains its empirical success. Extensive experiments, conducted under both synthetic and real-world setups, strongly support our theory.

On the Learning Dynamics of Two-layer Linear Networks with Label Noise SGD

Long-term Time Series Forecasting is crucial across numerous critical domains, yet its accuracy remains fundamentally constrained by the receptive field bottleneck in existing models. Mainstream Transformer- and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP)-based methods mainly rely on finite look-back windows, limiting their ability to model long-term dependencies and hurting forecasting performance. Naively extending the look-back window proves ineffective, as it not only introduces prohibitive computational complexity, but also drowns vital long-term dependencies in historical noise. To address these challenges, we propose CometNet, a novel Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting framework. CometNet first introduces a Contextual Motif Extraction module that identifies recurrent, dominant contextual motifs from complex historical sequences, providing extensive temporal dependencies far exceeding limited look-back windows; Subsequently, a Motif-guided Forecasting module is proposed, which integrates the extracted dominant motifs into forecasting. By dynamically mapping the look-back window to its relevant motifs, CometNet effectively harnesses their contextual information to strengthen long-term forecasting capability. Extensive experimental results on eight real-world datasets have demonstrated that CometNet significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly on extended forecast horizons.

CometNet: Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting

Dataset Condensation (DC) distills knowledge from large datasets into smaller ones, accelerating training and reducing storage requirements. However, despite notable progress, prior methods have largely overlooked the potential of quantization for further reducing storage costs. In this paper, we take the first step to explore post-training quantization in dataset condensation, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing storage size while maintaining representation quality without requiring expensive training cost. However, we find that at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-bit), conventional quantization leads to substantial degradation in representation quality, negatively impacting the networks trained on these data.
To address this, we propose a novel \emph{patch-based post-training quantization} approach that ensures localized quantization with minimal loss of information. To reduce the overhead of quantization parameters, especially for small patch sizes, we employ quantization-aware clustering to identify similar patches and subsequently aggregate them for efficient quantization. Furthermore, we introduce a refinement module to align the distribution between original images and their dequantized counterparts, compensating for quantization errors.
Our method is a plug-and-play framework that can be applied to synthetic images generated by various DC methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks including CIFAR-10/100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet subsets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior works under the same storage constraints. Notably, our method nearly \textbf{doubles the test accuracy} of existing methods at extreme compression regimes (e.g., 26.0\% $\rightarrow$ 54.1\% for DM at IPC=1), while operating directly on 2-bit images without additional distillation.

Post Training Quantization for Efficient Dataset Condensation

Selective deletion of data from deep models, known as unlearning, has become crucial for enforcing the right to be forgotten, while also mitigating the negative impact of flawed training data. Retraining deep models is often impractical due to data access restrictions and computational overhead. Existing retraining-free methods are typically based on the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which quantifies the importance of model parameters with respect to forgetting classes, applying equal dampening to these parameters. This approach implicitly assumes a semantically uniform representation space, where all retained classes are equidistant from the forgetting classes. However, this assumption often fails in real-world cross-modal retrieval scenarios characterized by multi-label and non-orthogonal semantics.
To overcome this limitation, we propose Prior-Prototype guided Partitioned dampening (PPP), an effective strategy for selective forgetting in cross-modal retrieval. First, PPP defines prior prototypes, which are semantic centers derived from well-trained models, to identify neighbor classes semantically close to the forgetting set. 
Then, PPP uses Fisher information to identify parameters sensitive to forgetting and partitions them into buffer and core regions based on their relative importance to the neighbor and retained sets.
Finally, PPP applies a hierarchical dampening strategy, where core parameters receive stronger suppression guided by prototype-based semantic disparities.
Comprehensive evaluations on four large-scale benchmarks show that PPP performs competitively with retraining-based baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability in selective unlearning for cross-modal retrieval.

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Cross-View Progressive Feature Filtering for Multi-View Graph Clustering in Remote Sensing

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