Singapore

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating up-to-date external knowledge, yet real-world web environments present unique challenges. These limitations manifest as two key challenges: pervasive misinformation in the web environment, which introduces unreliable or misleading content that can degrade retrieval accuracy, and the underutilization of web tools, which, if effectively employed, could enhance query precision and help mitigate this noise, ultimately improving retrieval results in RAG systems. To address these issues, we propose WebFilter, a novel RAG framework that generates source-restricted queries and filters out unreliable content. This approach combines a retrieval filtering mechanism with a behavior- and outcome-driven reward strategy, optimizing both query formulation and retrieval outcomes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WebFilter improves answer quality and retrieval precision, outperforming existing RAG methods on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/GuoqingWang1/WebFilter.

AAAI 2026

Careful Queries, Credible Results: Teaching RAG Models Advanced Web Search Tools with Reinforcement Learning

web-based question answering

query optimization

retrieval-augmented generation

## 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.

Accurate medical diagnosis often involves progressive visual focusing and iterative reasoning, characteristics commonly observed in clinical workflows. While recent vision-language models demonstrate promising chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), their purely on-policy learning paradigm tends to reinforce superficially coherent but clinically inaccurate reasoning paths. We propose MedEyes, a novel reinforcement learning framework that dynamically models clinician-style diagnostic reasoning by progressively attending to and interpreting relevant medical image regions. By incorporating off-policy expert guidance, MedEyes converts expert visual search trajectories into structured external behavioral signals, guiding the model toward clinically aligned visual reasoning. We design the Gaze-guided Reasoning Navigator (GRN) to emulate the diagnostic process through a dual-mode exploration strategy, scanning for systematic abnormality localization and drilling for detailed regional analysis. To balance expert imitation and autonomous discovery, we introduce the Confidence Value Sampler (CVS), which employs nucleus sampling and adaptive termination to create diverse yet credible exploration paths. Finally, the dual-stream GRPO optimization framework decouples on-policy and off-policy learning signals, mitigating reward assimilation and entropy collapse. Experiments demonstrate that MedEyes achieves an average performance improvement of +8.5\% across multiple medical VQA benchmarks, validating MedEyes's potential in building interpretable medical AI systems. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MedEyes.

MedEyes: Learning Dynamic Visual Focus for Medical Progressive Diagnosis

In many real-world applications of machine learning—such as recommendations, hiring, and lending—deployed models influence the data they are trained on, leading to feedback loops between predictions and data distribution. The performative prediction (PP) framework captures this phenomenon by modeling the data distribution as a function of the deployed model. While prior work has focused on finding performative stable (PS) solutions for robustness, their societal impacts, particularly regarding fairness, remain underexplored. We show that PS solutions can lead to severe polarization and prediction performance disparities, and that conventional fairness interventions in previous works often fail under model-dependent distribution shifts due to failing the PS criteria. To address these challenges in PP, we introduce novel fairness mechanisms that provably ensure both
stability and fairness, validated by theoretical analysis and empirical results.

Addressing Polarization and Unfairness in Performative Prediction

While significant progress has been achieved in multimodal facial generation using semantic masks and textual descriptions, conventional feature fusion approaches often fail to enable effective cross-modal interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal generation outcomes. To address this challenge, we introduce MDiTFace—a customized diffusion transformer framework that employs a unified tokenization strategy to process semantic mask and text inputs, eliminating discrepancies between heterogeneous modality representations. The framework facilitates comprehensive multimodal feature interaction through stacked, newly designed multivariate transformer blocks that process all conditions synchronously. Additionally, we design a novel decoupled attention mechanism by dissociating implicit dependencies between mask tokens and temporal embeddings. This mechanism segregates internal computations into dynamic and static pathways, enabling caching and reuse of features computed in static pathways after initial calculation, thereby reducing additional computational overhead introduced by mask condition by over 94\% while maintaining performance. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple established benchmarks demonstrate that MDiTFace significantly outperforms competing methods in both facial fidelity and conditional consistency. Code and model will be publicly available soon.

Multivariate Diffusion Transformer with Decoupled Attention for High-Fidelity Mask-Text Collaborative Facial Generation

In recent years, research in Participatory Budgeting (PB) has put a greater emphasis on rules satisfying notions of fairness and proportionality, with the Method of Equal Shares (MES) being a prominent example. However, proportionality can come at a cost to the total utilitarian welfare. Our work formalizes this relationship, by deriving minimum utilitarian welfare guarantees for MES for a subclass of satisfaction functions called DNS functions, which includes two of the most popular ways of measuring a voter’s utility in the PB setting: considering (1) the total cost of approved projects or (2) the total number of those projects. Our results are parameterized in terms of minimum and maximum project costs, which allows us to improve on the mostly negative results found in prior studies, and reduce to the existing multiwinner guarantee when project costs are equal. We show that our guarantees are asymptotically tight for rules satisfying Extended Justified Representation up to one project, showing that no proportional rule can achieve a better utilitarian guarantee than MES.

Utilitarian Guarantees for the Method of Equal Shares

Incremental Object Detection (IOD) aims to continuously learn new object classes without forgetting previously learned ones. A persistent challenge is catastrophic forgetting, primarily attributed to background shift in conventional detectors. While pseudo-labeling mitigates this in dense detectors, we identify a novel, distinct source of forgetting specific to DETR-like architectures: \textit{background foregrounding}. This arises from the exhaustiveness constraint of the Hungarian matcher, which forcibly assigns every ground truth target to one prediction, even when predictions primarily cover background regions (i.e., low IoU). This erroneous supervision compels the model to misclassify background features as specific foreground classes, disrupting learned representations and accelerating forgetting. To address this, we propose a Quality-guided Min-Cost Max-Flow (Q-MCMF) matcher. To avoid forced assignments, Q-MCMF builds a flow graph and prunes implausible matches based on geometric quality. It then optimizes for the final matching that minimizes cost and maximizes valid assignments. This strategy eliminates harmful supervision from background foregrounding while maximizing foreground learning signals. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset under various incremental settings demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Better Matching, Less Forgetting: A Quality-Guided Matcher for Transformer-based Incremental Object Detection

With the widespread deployment of cross-modal retrieval in real-world scenarios, ensuring robustness against adversarial attacks is increasingly critical. Remarkably, deep cross-modal hashing is highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to its discrete nature and low-dimensional hash codes, while existing defense methods often fail to suppress perturbations embedded in vulnerable features and lack the capacity to model modality-specific structural differences, resulting in suboptimal adversarial robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Disentangled Representation-Focused Generative Defense (DRFGD) framework for attack-tolerant cross-modal hashing. Without altering the structure of retrieval model, DRFGD defends against adversarial attacks by disentangling input representations into adversarial-robust and adversarial-vulnerable components, by an efficient dual-branch semantic-aware encoder. Guided by such disentangled robust features, an attack-tolerant generative module is seamlessly designed to synthesize semantically aligned and perturbation-resilient examples for robust adversarial training, thereby significantly promoting collaborative defense robustness to attackers. Consequently, the semantically consistent hash codes can be well obtained to enhance adversarial robustness in complex cross-modal attacking scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DRFGD substantially improves retrieval robustness under various attacking scenarios, and shows its improved defense performance in comparison with the SOTA works.

DRFGD: Disentangled Representation-Focused Generative Defense for Attack-Tolerant Cross-Modal Hashing

While diffusion models show promise for intent-based grasp generation, their isotropic noise schedules struggle with joint-specific sensitivity and task-aware variability. This limitation leads to grasps with suboptimal semantic alignment or physical feasibility. To address this challenge, we propose Semantic-guided Noise Scaling for grasp generation (SNS-Grasp), a novel framework that integrates two key innovations. First, the Semantic-guided Noise Scaling Diffusion (SNS-Diff) module generates intent-aware grasps by replacing isotropic noise with anisotropic modulation, dynamically adapting to task semantics and joint-specific sensitivity. Specifically, SNS-Diff leverages a pretrained Intent Recognizer to extract task-aware confidence scores and joint-specific gradient sensitivities from the interaction context. These signals adjust the noise scaling during denoising, downweighting perturbations for semantically critical joints to ensure semantic alignment. Second, the Fine-grained Grasp Refinement (FGR) module establishes dynamic joint-vertex coupling through fine-grained hand-object spatial relationships, enabling iterative optimization of physically executable grasps. Extensive experiments on OakInk and GRAB demonstrate SNS-Grasp's superior performance in semantic accuracy and physical feasibility, with robust generalization to unseen objects.

SNS-Grasp: Semantic-guided Noise Scaling for Grasp Generation

In recent years, Gaussian scene representations have achieved a series of promising results in 3D reconstruction. Compared to the previous 3DGS paradigm, the latest reconstruction approach 2DGS can achieve more accurate geometric representation using fewer Gaussian points. Accordingly, developing a panoramic segmentation algorithm suitable for 2DGS-reconstructed scenes is of significant importance. However, existing segmentation methods are primarily designed for 3DGS. They either fail to account for all objects in complex segmentation scenes or suffer from significant performance degradation when applied to 2D Gaussian scenes. Moreover, these methods consistently exhibit poor cross-dataset generalization. To address these issues, we propose IQGS, a segmentation framework applicable to 2DGS representations. Specifically, IQGS employs per-instance query and relaxed object-level supervision instead of strict pixel-level ID supervision , effectively mitigating the segmentation performance degradation that occurs when applied to 2DGS. At the same time, by learning features independent of specific object ID assignments, IQGS enhances its ability to generalize across diverse datasets. Our method achieves impressive panoramic segmentation results across multiple datasets, with an average mIoU of 66.6%, surpassing the state-of-the-art method Gaussian Grouping, which achieves 57.17%.

IQGS: Instance Query-based Gaussian Segmentation

Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as a vital backbone for a wide range of AI applications, including natural language understanding and recommendation. A promising yet underexplored direction is numerical reasoning over KGs, which involves inferring new facts by leveraging not only symbolic triples but also numerical attribute values (e.g., length, weight). 
However, existing methods fall short in two key aspects: 
(1) Incomplete semantic integration: Most models struggle to jointly encode entities, relations, and numerical attributes in a unified representation space, limiting their ability to extract relation-aware semantics from numeric information. 
(2) Ordinal indistinguishability: Due to subtle differences between close values and sampling imbalance, models often fail to capture fine-grained ordinal relationships (e.g., longer, heavier), especially in the presence of hard negatives.
To address these challenges, we propose NumCoKE—a numerical reasoning framework for KGs based on Mixture-of-Experts and Ordinal Contrastive Embedding. To overcome (C1), we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts Knowledge-Aware (MoEKA) encoder that jointly aligns symbolic and numeric components into a shared semantic space, while dynamically routing attribute features to relation-specific experts. To handle (C2), we propose Ordinal Knowledge Contrastive Learning (OKCL), which constructs ordinal-aware positive and negative samples using prior knowledge, enabling the model to better discriminate subtle semantic shifts.
Extensive experiments on three public KG benchmarks demonstrate that NumCoKE consistently outperforms competitive baselines across diverse attribute distributions, validating its superiority in both semantic integration and ordinal reasoning.

NumCoKE: Ordinal-Aware Numerical Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs with Mixture-of-Experts and Contrastive Learning

Optimization‐based text‑to‑3D methods distill guidance from 2D generative models via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), but implicitly treat this guidance as static. This work shows that ignoring source dynamics yields inconsistent trajectories that suppress or merge semantic cues, leading to "semantic over-smoothing" artifacts. As such, we reformulate text‑to‑3D optimization as mapping a *dynamically evolving source* distribution to a fixed target distribution. We cast the problem into a dual‑conditioned latent space, conditioned on both the text prompt and the intermediately rendered image. Given this joint setup, we observe that the image condition naturally anchors the current source distribution. Building on this insight, we introduce AnchorDS, an improved score distillation mechanism that provides state‑anchored guidance with image conditions and stabilizes generation. We further penalize erroneous source estimates and design a lightweight filter strategy and fine‑tuning strategy that refines the anchor with negligible overhead. AnchorDS produces finer-grained detail, more natural colours, and stronger semantic consistency, particularly for complex prompts, while maintaining efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses previous methods in both quality and efficiency.

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MedEyes: Learning Dynamic Visual Focus for Medical Progressive Diagnosis

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