Singapore

Large language model (LLM)-based visual dialogue (VD) systems have made response generation for image-grounded conversations more correct and coherent. However, user engagement - the extent to which a user is interested, emotionally involved, and willing to continue the conversation - remains a challenge. To fully explore engaging VD, we propose: (i) a new task named Audio-enhanced VD (AVD), which introduces additional audio dialogue contexts that can more vividly convey the speaker&#39;s emotions as input, with the aim of generating correct but more engaging dialogue responses. Specifically, we employ a text-to-speech model as the modality translator to generate the paired acoustic utterances from the inputting textual utterances; (ii) an accompanying approach named Visually-grounded and Interleaved Text-Audio Dialogue Modeling (VITA-DM), which utilizes both image-grounded information and interleaved text-audio utterances for visual dialogue modeling, differentiating from previous multi-modal LLM (MLLM)-based methods that normally model text and audio modalities separately. We also present three pre-training tasks to better learn multi-modal interactions across language, vision, and audio; (iii) a novel metric named Multi-Modal Engagement (MME), which fills the gap of engagement estimation in VD and can provide a fine-grained assessment along emotional, attentional, and reply engagement dimensions (EE, AE, RE). We experiment on two popular datasets and provide extensive evaluations (automatic, engagement-specific, and human), supporting the validity of our approach. Furthermore, based on empirical results that reveal that emotions contribute the most to engagement, we justify our emphasis on the emotional aspect throughout the definition, solution, and evaluation of our task.

AAAI 2026

Making Visual Dialogue More Engaging: A New Task, Method, and Metric

tri-modal dialogue modeling

sentiment-aware audio generation

engagement measurement

visual dialogue

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large language model (LLM)-based visual dialogue (VD) systems have made response generation for image-grounded conversations more correct and coherent. However, user engagement - the extent to which a user is interested, emotionally involved, and willing to continue the conversation - remains a challenge. To fully explore engaging VD, we propose: (i) a new task named Audio-enhanced VD (AVD), which introduces additional audio dialogue contexts that can more vividly convey the speaker's emotions as input, with the aim of generating correct but more engaging dialogue responses. Specifically, we employ a text-to-speech model as the modality translator to generate the paired acoustic utterances from the inputting textual utterances; (ii) an accompanying approach named Visually-grounded and Interleaved Text-Audio Dialogue Modeling (VITA-DM), which utilizes both image-grounded information and interleaved text-audio utterances for visual dialogue modeling, differentiating from previous multi-modal LLM (MLLM)-based methods that normally model text and audio modalities separately. We also present three pre-training tasks to better learn multi-modal interactions across language, vision, and audio; (iii) a novel metric named Multi-Modal Engagement (MME), which fills the gap of engagement estimation in VD and can provide a fine-grained assessment along emotional, attentional, and reply engagement dimensions (EE, AE, RE). We experiment on two popular datasets and provide extensive evaluations (automatic, engagement-specific, and human), supporting the validity of our approach. Furthermore, based on empirical results that reveal that emotions contribute the most to engagement, we justify our emphasis on the emotional aspect throughout the definition, solution, and evaluation of our task.

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.

As a data-driven learning approach, model-based offline reinforcement learning (MORL) aims to learn a policy by exploiting a dynamics model derived from an existing dataset. Applying conservative quantification to the dynamics model, most existing works on MORL generate trajectories that approximate the real data distribution to facilitate policy learning. However, these methods typically overlook the influence of historical information on environmental dynamics, thus generating unreliable trajectories that fail to align with the true data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new MORL algorithm called Reliability-guaranteed and Reward-seeking Transformer (RT). RT can avoid generating unreliable trajectories through the calculation of cumulative reliability of the trajectories, which is a weighted variational distance between the generated trajectory distribution and the true data distribution.
Moreover, by sampling candidate actions with high rewards, RT can efficiently generate high-reward trajectories from the existing offline data, thereby further facilitating policy learning. We theoretically prove the performance guarantees of RT in policy learning, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness against state-of-the-art model-based methods on several offline benchmark tasks and a large-scale industrial dataset from an on-demand food delivery platform.

Reliability-Guaranteed and Reward-Seeking Sequence Modeling for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

RNA inverse folding, designing sequences to form specific 3D structures, is critical for therapeutics, gene regulation, and synthetic biology. Current methods, focused on sequence recovery, struggle to address structural objectives like secondary structure consistency (SS), minimum free energy (MFE), and local distance difference test (LDDT), leading to suboptimal structural accuracy. To tackle this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework integrated with a latent diffusion model (LDM). Drawing inspiration from the success of diffusion models in RNA inverse folding, which adeptly model complex sequence-structure interactions, we develop an LDM incorporating pre-trained RNA-FM embeddings from a large-scale RNA model. These embeddings capture co-evolutionary patterns, markedly improving sequence recovery accuracy. However, existing approaches, including diffusion-based methods, cannot effectively handle non-differentiable structural objectives. By contrast, RL excels in this task by using policy-driven reward optimization to navigate complex, non-gradient-based objectives, offering a significant advantage over traditional methods. In summary, we propose the Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model (SOLD), a novel RL framework that optimizes single-step noise without sampling the full diffusion trajectory, achieving efficient refinement of multiple structural objectives. Experimental results demonstrate SOLD surpasses its LDM baseline and state-of-the-art methods across all metrics, establishing a robust framework for RNA inverse folding with profound implications for biotechnological and therapeutic applications.

Structure-based RNA Design by Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model

Fine-grained image-text alignment is a pivotal challenge in multimodal learning, underpinning key applications such as visual question answering, image captioning, and vision-language navigation. Unlike global alignment, fine-grained alignment requires precise correspondence between localized visual regions and textual tokens, often hindered by noisy attention mechanisms and oversimplified modeling of cross-modal relationships. In this work, we identify two fundamental limitations of existing approaches: the lack of robust intra-modal mechanisms to assess the significance of visual and textual tokens, leading to poor generalization in complex scenes; and the absence of fine-grained uncertainty modeling, which fails to capture the one-to-many and many-to-one nature of region-token correspondences. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework that incorporates significance-aware and granularity-aware modeling and region-level uncertainty modeling. Our method leverages modality-specific biases to identify salient features without relying on brittle cross-modal attention, and represents region features as a mixture of Gaussian distributions to capture fine-grained uncertainty. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various backbone architectures, significantly enhancing the robustness and interpretability of fine-grained image-text alignment.

Cross Modal Fine-grained Alignment via Granularity-aware and Region-uncertain Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in hardware description language (HDL) generation. However, existing approaches often rely on free-form natural language descriptions that are often ambiguous, redundant, and unstructured, which poses significant challenges for downstream Verilog code generation. We treat hardware code generation as a complex transformation from an open-ended natural language space to a domain-specific, highly constrained target space. To bridge this gap, we introduce Core Refined Understanding eXpression (CRUX), a structured intermediate space that captures the essential semantics of user intent while organizing the expression for precise Verilog code generation. We further design a two-stage training framework, comprising Joint Expression Modeling and Dual-Space Optimization, to enhance the quality of both CRUX and Verilog code. Experiments across multiple Verilog generation benchmarks demonstrate that our model, QiMeng-CRUX-V, achieves state-of-the-art performance among general models, particularly under challenging design tasks. Furthermore, the CRUX space proves transferable and beneficial when used as input prompts for other code models, highlighting its effectiveness in narrowing the gap between free-form natural language descriptions and precise Verilog generation.

QiMeng-CRUX: Narrowing the Gap Between Natural Language and Verilog via Core Refined Understanding eXpression

Knowledge distillation based on large vision-language models (VLMs) has recently emerged as a significant solution to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tasks. However, existing methods employ a two-stage training pipeline, which not only complicates the training procedure but also lacks interactions between the source and target domains, severely hindering real-time cross-domain knowledge transfer. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{E}nd-to-End \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{D}istillation for UD\textbf{A} with large VLMs (termed as EKDA). (1) EKDA employs a lightweight prompt learning mechanism to first embed the knowledge from the source domain into VLMs, and then simultaneously utilize the image encoder and text encoder of VLMs to perform knowledge distillation on the target domain, significantly reducing the domain gap. (2) EKDA designs a teacher-student alternating training strategy to implement real-time collaborative interactions across domains, enabling an end-to-end paradigm to provide accurate source domain-aware supervision for the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 widely recognized benchmark datasets including Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA-2017, and Mini-DomainNet. Experimental results demonstrate that EKDA achieves significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art UDA approaches, while maintaining a much lower model complexity. Take Office-Home for example, EKDA has gained at least 2.7\% performance improvement while reducing the learnable parameters by over 80\% compared with the strongest baselines. The code is available at \textcolor{blue}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EKDA}.

End-to-End Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Large Vision-language Models

3D semantic segmentation serves as a fundamental component in many applications, such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Although recent methods have advanced the field, adapting these methods to new environments or object categories without extensive retraining remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce xMHashSeg, a novel training-free cross-modal LiDAR semantic segmentation framework. xMHashSeg leverages foundation models and non-parametric network to extract features from 2D images and 3D point clouds, subsequently integrating these features through hash learning. Specifically, We develop point-SANN, a novel self-adaption non-parametric network that can extract robust 3D features from raw point clouds, while 2D features are directly extracted through the foundation model DINOv2. To reconcile inconsistencies across different modals, we introduce a Hash Code Learning Module that projects all information into a common hash space, learning a consistent hash code that enhances feature integration. Additionally, depth maps are utilized as an intermediary form between 2D and 3D data to facilitate convergence during hash code learning. Our experimental results on various multi-modality datasets demonstrate that xMHashSeg outperforms zero-shot learning approaches and achieve performance close to that of unsupervised domain adaptation and test-time adaptation methods, without requiring any annotations or additional training.

xMHashSeg: Cross-modal Hash Learning for Training-free Unsupervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in vision-language tasks, yet they still face challenges when processing long-duration video inputs. The limitation arises from MLLMs' context limit and training costs, necessitating sparse frame sampling before feeding videos into MLLMs. Existing video MLLMs adopt training-free uniform sampling or keyframe search, which may miss critical events or be constrained by the pre-trained models' event understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, building a training-based method remains challenging due to the unsupervised and non-differentiable nature of sparse frame sampling. To address these problems, we propose Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization (**TSPO**), advancing MLLMs' long-form video-language understanding via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first propose a trainable event-aware temporal agent, which captures event-query correlation for performing probabilistic keyframe selection. Then, we propose the TSPO reinforcement learning paradigm, which models keyframe selection and language generation as a joint decision-making process, enabling end-to-end group relative optimization with efficient rule-based rewards. Furthermore, for the TSPO's training, we propose a long video training data construction pipeline with comprehensive temporal data for general video understanding and video Needle-in-a-Haystack data for long-range temporal localization. Finally, we incorporate rule-based answering accuracy and temporal locating reward mechanisms to optimize the temporal sampling policy. Comprehensive experiments show that our TSPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple long video understanding benchmarks, and shows transferable ability across different cutting-edge Video-MLLMs.

TSPO: Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization for Long-form Video Language Understanding

With the widespread deployment of deep learning models in multi-party collaborative scenarios, the issues of secure model access control and intellectual property (IP) protection have become increasingly critical. To address the limitations of existing methods that lack proactive defense mechanisms in such settings, this paper introduces a novel paradigm Consensus Learning which enables fine-grained control over model execution permissions via a multi-party joint authorization mechanism. Building on this, we propose the Collaborative Perturbation Trigger Method (CPTM), which allows participating parties to collaboratively generate perturbation-based trigger data that embed identity features. The model can only be activated using the collectively constructed trigger, enforcing tightly bound access control without modifying the model architecture. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, and Face-LFW datasets demonstrate that the proposed method maintains prediction accuracy within 2% of the baseline unprotected models on authorized data. In contrast, under unauthorized or adversarial inputs, model accuracy drops below 10%, showcasing strong access control capabilities and robustness. This study offers a novel direction for building scalable, robust, and proactively protected deep learning models in multi-party collaborative environments.

Consensus Learning with Multi-Party Perturbation Triggers for Secure Model Access

Large language models face significant cost challenges in long-sequence inference. To address this, reusing historical Key-Value (KV) Cache for improved inference efficiency has become a mainstream approach. Recent advances further enhance throughput by sparse attention mechanisms to select the most relevant KV Cache, thereby reducing sequence length. However, such techniques are limited to single-context scenarios, where historical KV Cache is computed sequentially with causal-attention dependencies. In retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios, where retrieved documents as context are unknown beforehand, each document’s KV Cache is computed and stored independently (termed multiple-context KV Cache), lacking cross-attention between contexts. This renders existing methods ineffective. Although prior work partially recomputes multiple-context KV Cache to mitigate accuracy loss from missing cross-attention, it requires retaining all KV Cache throughout, failing to reduce memory overhead. This paper presents SamKV, the first exploration of attention sparsification for multiple-context KV Cache. Specifically, SamKV takes into account the complementary information of other contexts when sparsifying one context, and then locally recomputes the sparsified information. Experiments demonstrate that our method compresses sequence length to 15% without accuracy degradation compared with full-recomputation baselines, significantly boosting throughput in multi-context RAG scenarios.

Sparse Attention Across Multiple-Context KV Cache

Accurate prediction of driving intention is key to enhancing the safety and interactive efficiency of human-machine co-driving systems. It serves as a cornerstone for achieving high-level autonomous driving. However, current approaches remain inadequate for accurately modeling the complex spatiotemporal interdependencies and the unpredictable variability of human driving behavior. To address these challenges, we propose CaTFormer, a causal Temporal Transformer that explicitly models causal interactions between driver behavior and environmental context for robust intention prediction. Specifically, CaTFormer introduces a novel Reciprocal Delayed Fusion (RDF) mechanism for precise temporal alignment of internal and external feature streams, a Counterfactual Residual Encoding (CRE) module that systematically eliminates spurious correlations to reveal authentic causal dependencies, and an innovative Feature Synthesis Network (FSN) that adaptively synthesizes these purified representations into coherent temporal representations. We evaluate the proposed CaTFormer on the public Brain4Cars dataset, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance. It effectively captures complex causal temporal dependencies and enhances both the accuracy and transparency of driving intention prediction.

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Reliability-Guaranteed and Reward-Seeking Sequence Modeling for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

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