Singapore

Navigation instruction generation for visually impaired (VI) individuals (NIG-VI) is critical yet relatively underexplored. This study focuses on generating precise, in-situ, step-by-step navigation instructions that are practically usable for VI users. Specifically, we propose LaF-GRPO (LLM-as-Follower GRPO), where an LLM simulates VI user responses to navigation instructions, thereby providing feedback rewards to guide the post-training of a Vision-Language Model (VLM). This enhances instruction accuracy and usability while reducing costly real-world data collection needs. To address the scarcity of dedicated benchmarks in this field, we introduce NIG4VI, a 27k-sample open-source dataset to facilitate training and evaluation. It comprises diverse navigation scenarios with accurate spatial coordinates, supporting detailed and open-ended in-situ instruction generation. Experiments on NIG4VI demonstrate the effectiveness of LaF-GRPO through quantitative metrics (e.g., Zero-(LaF-GRPO) boosts BLEU 14\%; SFT+(LaF-GRPO) METEOR 0.542 vs. GPT-4o 0.323), and qualitative analysis further confirms that our method yields more intuitive and safer instructions.

AAAI 2026

LaF-GRPO: In-Situ Navigation Instruction Generation for the Visually Impaired via GRPO with LLM-as-Follower Reward

multi-modal nlp

language grounding

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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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.

Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved remarkable success in realistic voice cloning (VC), while they also increase the risk of malicious misuse. 
Existing proactive defenses designed for traditional VC models aim to disrupt the forgery process, but they have been proven incompatible with DMs due to the intricate generative mechanisms of diffusion. 
To bridge this gap, we introduce VoiceCloak, a multi-dimensional proactive defense framework with the goal of obfuscating speaker identity and degrading perceptual quality in potential unauthorized VC. 
To achieve these goals, we conduct a focused analysis to identify specific vulnerabilities within DMs, allowing VoiceCloak to disrupt the cloning process by introducing adversarial perturbations into the reference audio. 
Specifically, to obfuscate speaker identity, VoiceCloak first targets speaker identity by distorting representation learning embeddings to maximize identity variation, which is guided by auditory perception principles.
Additionally, VoiceCloak disrupts crucial conditional guidance processes, particularly attention context, thereby preventing the alignment of vocal characteristics that are essential for achieving convincing cloning. 
Then, to address the second objective, VoiceCloak introduces score magnitude amplification to actively steer the reverse trajectory away from the generation of high-quality speech. 
Noise-guided semantic corruption is further employed to disrupt structural speech semantics captured by DMs, degrading output quality. 
Extensive experiments highlight VoiceCloak's outstanding defense success rate against unauthorized diffusion-based voice cloning. 
Additional audio samples of VoiceCloak are available in supplementary material for auditory demonstration.

VoiceCloak: A Multi-Dimensional Defense Framework Against Unauthorized Diffusion-Based Voice Cloning

Anomaly detection (AD) is a fundamental task of critical importance across numerous domains. Current systems increasingly operate in rapidly evolving environments that generate diverse yet interconnected data modalities—such as time series, system logs, and tabular records—as exemplified by modern IT systems. Effective AD methods in such environments must therefore possess two critical capabilities: (1) the ability to handle heterogeneous data formats within a unified framework, allowing the model to process and detect multiple modalities in a consistent manner during anomalous events; (2) a strong generalization ability to quickly adapt to new scenarios without extensive retraining. However, most existing methods fall short of these requirements, as they typically focus on single modalities and lack the flexibility to generalize across domains. To address this gap, we introduce a novel paradigm: In-Context Anomaly Detection (ICAD), where anomalies are defined by their dissimilarity to a relevant reference set of normal samples. Under this paradigm, we propose ICAD-LLM, a unified AD framework leveraging Large Language Models' in-context learning abilities to process heterogeneous data within a single model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ICAD-LLM achieves competitive performance with task-specific AD methods and exhibits strong generalization to previously unseen tasks, which substantially reduces deployment costs and enables rapid adaptation to new environments. To the best of our knowledge, ICAD-LLM is the first model capable of handling anomaly detection tasks across diverse domains and modalities.

ICAD-LLM: One-for-All Anomaly Detection via In-Context Learning with Large Language Models

Although Gaussian scene representation has achieved remarkable success in tracking and mapping, most existing methods are confined to single-agent systems. Current multi-agent solutions typically rely on centralized architectures, which struggle to account for communication bandwidth constraints. Furthermore, the inherent depth ambiguity of 3D Gaussian splatting poses notable challenges in maintaining geometric consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce CoMA-SLAM, the first distributed multi-agent Gaussian SLAM framework. By leveraging 2D Gaussian surfels and robust initialization strategy, CoMA-SLAM enhances tracking accuracy and geometry consistency. It efficiently manages communication bandwidth while dynamically scaling with the number of agents. Through the integration of intra- and inter-loop closure, distributed keyframe optimization and submap centric update, our framework ensures global consistency and robustly alignment. Synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoMA-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in pose accuracy, rendering fidelity, and geometric consistency while maintaining competitive efficiency across distributed multi-agent systems. Notably, by avoiding data transmission to a centralized server, our method reduces communication bandwidth by 99.8% compared to centralized approaches.

CoMA-SLAM: Collaborative Multi-Agent Gaussian SLAM with Geometric Consistency

Collaborative perception has garnered significant attention as a crucial technology to overcome the perceptual limitations of single-agent systems. Many state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods have achieved communication efficiency and high performance via intermediate fusion. However, they share a critical vulnerability: their performance degrades under adverse communication conditions due to the misalignment induced by data transmission, which severely hampers their practical deployment. To bridge this gap, we re-examine different fusion paradigms, and recover that the strengths of intermediate and late fusion are not a trade-off, but a complementary pairing. Based on this key insight, we propose CoRA, a novel collaborative robust architecture with a hybrid approach to decouple performance from robustness with low communication. It is composed of two components: a feature-level fusion branch and an object-level correction branch. Its first branch selects critical features and fuses them efficiently to ensure both performance and scalability. The second branch leverages semantic relevance to correct spatial displacements, guaranteeing resilience against pose errors. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of CoRA. Under extreme scenarios, CoRA improves upon its baseline performance by approximately 19\% in AP@0.7 with more than 5x less communication volume, which makes it a promising solution for robust collaborative perception.

CoRA: A Collaborative Robust Architecture with Hybrid Fusion for Efficient Perception

Reconstructing realistic 3D human avatars from monocular videos is a challenging task due to the limited geometric information and complex non-rigid motion involved. We present MonoCloth, a new method for reconstructing and animating clothed human avatars from monocular videos. To overcome the limitations of monocular input, we introduce a part-based decomposition strategy that separates the avatar into body, face, hands, and clothing. This design reflects the varying levels of reconstruction difficulty and deformation complexity across these components. Specifically, we focus on detailed geometry recovery for the face and hands. For clothing, we propose a dedicated cloth simulation module that captures garment deformation using temporal motion cues and geometric constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that MonoCloth improves both visual reconstruction quality and animation realism compared to existing methods. Furthermore, thanks to its part-based design, MonoCloth also supports additional tasks such as clothing transfer, underscoring its versatility and practical utility.

MonoCloth: Reconstruction and Animation of Cloth-Decoupled Human Avatars from Monocular Videos

Millimeter-wave radar offers a privacy-preserving and environment-robust alternative to vision-based sensing, enabling human motion analysis in challenging conditions such as low light, occlusions, rain, or smoke. However, its sparse point clouds pose significant challenges for semantic understanding. We present RadarLLM, the first framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for human motion understanding from radar signals. RadarLLM introduces two key innovations: (1) a motion-guided radar tokenizer based on our Aggregate VQ-VAE architecture, integrating deformable body templates and masked trajectory modeling to convert spatial-temporal radar sequences into compact semantic tokens; and (2) a radar-aware language model that establishes cross-modal alignment between radar and text in a shared embedding space. 
To overcome the scarcity of paired radar-text data, we generate a realistic radar-text dataset from motion-text datasets with a physics-aware synthesis pipeline. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that RadarLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, enabling robust and interpretable motion understanding under privacy and visibility constraints, even in adverse environments. We will release the full implementation to support further research. Partial demo, code, and more details can be found in the supplementary material.

RadarLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Human Motion from Millimeter-wave Point Cloud Sequence

Pansharpening under thin cloudy conditions is a practically significant yet rarely addressed task, challenged by simultaneous spatial resolution degradation and cloud-induced spectral distortions. Existing methods often address cloud removal and pansharpening sequentially, leading to cumulative errors and suboptimal performance due to the lack of joint degradation modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a \textbf{Unified Pansharpening Model with Thin Cloud Removal (Pan-TCR)}, an end-to-end framework that integrates physical priors. Motivated by theoretical analysis in the frequency domain, we design a frequency-decoupled restoration (FDR) block that disentangles the restoration of multispectral image (MSI) features into amplitude and phase components, each guided by complementary degradation-robust prompts: the near-infrared (NIR) band amplitude for cloud-resilient restoration, and the panchromatic (PAN) phase for high-resolution structural enhancement. To ensure coherence between the two components, we further introduce an interactive inter-frequency consistency (IFC) module, enabling cross-modal refinement that enforces consistency and robustness across frequency cues. Furthermore, we introduce the first real-world thin-cloud contaminated pansharpening dataset (\textbf{PanTCR-GF2}), comprising paired clean and cloudy PAN-MSI images, to enable robust benchmarking under realistic conditions. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of Pan-TCR, establishing a new benchmark for pansharpening under realistic atmospheric degradations.

Pansharpening for Thin-Cloud Contaminated Remote Sensing Images: A Unified Framework and Benchmark Dataset

Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) aims to infer missing facts by modeling historical events and latent temporal dependencies in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). Recently, TKGC methods that integrate graph embeddings into Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise by leveraging the structural information of TKGs together with the powerful reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, these embedding-based methods are limited by suboptimal graph representations due to noise and long-tail issues in real-world scenarios, and insufficient cross-modal alignment between graph and language, hindering LLMs' ability to fully capture the temporal and structural information of TKGs. To address these issues, we propose TGCA-LLM, a novel embedding-based framework for TKGC. Specifically, TGCA-LLM first employs time-aware contrastive learning to align fact texts with graph structures in the temporal dimension, generating robust graph embeddings and establishing initial cross-modal alignment. Then, through a two-stage tuning process, it enables LLMs to gradually acquire structural and temporal knowledge from graph embeddings while enhancing their cross-modal reasoning capabilities in TKGC. Extensive experiments on three widely used real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TGCA-LLM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines by at least 8.7% MRR, highlighting its effectiveness.

TGCA-LLM: Time-Aware Graph-Text Contrastive Alignment for Enhancing LLMs in Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Flow matching-based generative models offer a principled approach to modeling continuous-time dynamics in speech generation. However, inference is often computationally expensive due to repeated neural network evaluations required by ODE solvers.
We propose WaveEx, a training-free and plug-in acceleration framework which replaces portions of ODE integration with wavelet-guided extrapolation. By leveraging the multi-scale structure of latent trajectories, WaveEx predicts future states directly in the frequency domain without additional model evaluations or architectural changes.
WaveEx consistently accelerates inference across diverse speech generation tasks. The gains are especially pronounced in tasks like speech synthesis (up to 5.73$\times$ speedup) and music generation (2.75$\times$), where flow matching plays a central role in alignment modeling and dense ODE integration. Even in tasks with simpler input-output mappings such as speech enhancement (4.55$\times$) and voice conversion (2.75$\times$), WaveEx still achieves notable acceleration, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of the approach.
These results highlight wavelet-guided extrapolation as a lightweight and broadly applicable alternative to full ODE solving for flow matching-based speech generation.

WaveEx: Accelerating Flow Matching-based Speech Generation via Wavelet-guided Extrapolation

Training large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally constrained by limited device memory and costly inter-device communication. Although pipeline parallelism alleviates memory pressure by partitioning models across devices, it incurs activation communication overhead that scales linearly with sequence length, limiting efficiency in long-context training. Recent weight-passing approaches (e.g., WeiPipe) mitigate this by transmitting model weights instead of activations, but suffer from redundant peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers and underutilized intra-node bandwidth. We propose TawPipe—topology-aware weight pipeline parallelism, which exploits hierarchical bandwidth in distributed clusters for improved communication efficiency. TawPipe: (i) groups devices based on topology to optimize intra-node collective and inter-node P2P communication; (ii) assigns each device a fixed shard of model weights and gradients, avoiding redundant transfers; and (iii) overlaps communication with computation to hide latency. Unlike global collective operations used in Fully Sharded Data Parallelism, TawPipe confines most communication within node boundaries, significantly reducing cross-node traffic. Extensive experiments on up to 24 GPUs with LLaMA‑style models show that TawPipe achieves superior throughput and scalability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

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