Singapore

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising performance in complex tasks. However, the resource-consuming reasoning processes may be exploited by attackers to maliciously occupy the resources of the servers, leading to a crash, like the DDoS attack in cyber. To this end, we propose a novel attack method on LRMs termed ExtendAttack to maliciously occupy the resources of servers by stealthily extending the reasoning processes of LRMs. Concretely, we systematically obfuscate characters within a benign prompt, transforming them into a complex, poly-base ASCII representation. This compels the model to perform a series of computationally intensive decoding sub-tasks that are deeply embedded within the semantic structure of the query itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ExtendAttack. Remarkably, it significantly increases response length and latency, with the former increasing by over 2.7 times for the o3 model on the HumanEval benchmark. Besides, it preserves the original meaning of the query and achieves comparable answer accuracy, showing the stealthiness.

AAAI 2026

ExtendAttack: Attacking Servers of LRMs via Extending Reasoning

nlp: safety and robustness

nlp: (large) language models

ai safety

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.

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) is crucial for protecting facial recognition systems from presentation attacks. Previous methods approached this task as a classification problem, lacking interpretability and reasoning behind the predicted results. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and decision-making in visual tasks. However, there are currently no MLLMs for FAS and existing FAS datasets only contain simple classification labels without corresponding explanations. To address this gap, we propose FaceShield, a MLLM for FAS, along with the corresponding pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, FaceShield-pre10K and FaceShield-sft45K. FaceShield is capable of determining the authenticity of faces, identifying types of spoofing attacks, providing reasoning for its judgments, and detecting attack areas. Specifically, we employ spoof-aware vision perception (SAVP) that incorporates both the original image and auxiliary information based on prior knowledge. We then use an prompt-guided vision token masking (PVTM) strategy to random mask vision tokens, thereby improving the model's generalization ability. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that FaceShield significantly outperforms previous deep learning models and general MLLMs on four FAS tasks, i.e., coarse-grained classification, fine-grained classification, reasoning, and attack localization . Our instruction datasets, protocols, and codes will be released soon.

FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models

State-of-the-art (SOTA) gradient-based adversarial attacks on spiking neural networks (SNNs), which largely rely on extending FGSM and PGD frameworks, face a critical limitation: substantial attack latency from multi-timestep processing, rendering them infeasible for practical real-time applications. This inefficiency stems from their design as direct extensions of ANN paradigms, which fail to exploit key SNN properties. In this paper, we propose the timestep compressed attack (TCA), a novel framework that significantly reduces attack latency. TCA introduces two components founded on key insights into SNN behavior. First, timestep-level backpropagation (TLBP) is based on our finding that global temporal information in backpropagation to generate perturbations is not critical for an attack’s success, enabling per-timestep evaluation for early stopping. Second, adversarial membrane potential reuse (A-MPR) is motivated by the observation that initial timesteps are inefficiently spent accumulating membrane potential, a warm-up phase that can be pre-calculated and reused. Our experiments on VGG-11 and ResNet-17 with the CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS datasets show that TCA significantly reduces the required attack latency by up to 56.6% and 57.1% compared to SOTA methods in white-box and black-box settings, respectively, while maintaining a comparable attack success rate.

Timestep-Compressed Attack on Spiking Neural Networks Through Timestep-Level Backpropagation

Generating behaviors that align with human expectations is a key requirement for human-robot collaboration. Potential behavior misalignment could lead to the robot performing actions with unanticipated, potentially dangerous side effects even while pursuing human goals. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric called Goal State Divergence $\mathcal{(GSD)}$ which quantifies the difference between the state a robot achieved in response to a human-specified goal and what the human expected. In cases where $\mathcal{GSD}$ cannot be directly calculated, we show how it can be approximated using maximal and minimal bounds. We then leverage $\mathcal{GSD}$ in our novel human-robot goal alignment design (HRGAD) problem, which identifies a minimal set of environment modifications that can reduce such mismatches. We show the effectiveness of our method in reducing the goal state divergence by empirically evaluating our approach on several planning benchmarks.

Reducing Goal State Divergence with Environment Design

Human writers often begin their stories with an overarching mental scene, where they envision the interactions between characters and their environment. Inspired by this creative process, we propose a novel approach to long-form story generation, termed hybrid bottom-up long-form story generation, using multi-agent simulations. In our method, agents interact within a dynamic sandbox environment, where their behaviors and interactions with one another and the environment generate emergent events. These events form the foundation for the story, enabling organic character development and plot progression. Unlike traditional top-down approaches that impose rigid structures, our hybrid bottom-up approach allows for the natural unfolding of events, fostering more spontaneous and engaging storytelling. The system is capable of generating stories exceeding 10,000 words while maintaining coherence and consistency, addressing some of the key challenges faced by current story generation models. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several metrics. This approach offers a scalable and innovative solution for creating dynamic, immersive long-form stories that evolve organically from agent-driven interactions.

StoryBox: Collaborative Multi-Agent Simulation for Hybrid Bottom-Up Long-Form Story Generation Using Large Language Models

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to use ex
ternal tools unlocks powerful real-world interactions, mak
ing rigorous evaluation essential. However, current bench
marks primarily report final accuracy, revealing what mod
els can do but obscuring the cognitive bottlenecks that define
their true capability boundaries. To move from simple per
formance scoring to a diagnostic tool, we introduce a frame
workgroundedinCognitive LoadTheory.Ourframeworkde
constructs task complexity into two quantifiable components:
Intrinsic Load, the inherent structural complexity of the solu
tion path, formalized with a novel Tool Interaction Graph; and
Extraneous Load, the difficulty arising from ambiguous task
presentation. To enable controlled experiments, we construct
ToolLoad-Bench, the first benchmark with parametrically ad
justable cognitive load. Our evaluation reveals distinct per
formance cliffs as cognitive load increases, allowing us to
precisely map each model’s capability boundary. We validate
that our framework’s predictions are highly calibrated with
empirical results, establishing a principled methodology for
understanding an agent’s limits and a practical foundation for
building more efficient systems.

Beyond Accuracy: A Cognitive Load Framework for Mapping the Capability Boundaries of Tool-use Agents

Recent advances in vision-language models have opened up new possibilities for reasoning-driven image geolocalization. However, existing approaches often rely on synthetic reasoning annotations or external image retrieval, which can limit interpretability and generalizability. In this paper, we present Geo-R1, a retrieval-free framework that uncovers structured reasoning paths from existing ground-truth coordinates and optimizes geolocation accuracy via reinforcement learning. We propose the Chain of Region, a rule-based hierarchical reasoning paradigm that generates precise, interpretable supervision by mapping GPS coordinates to geographic entities (e.g., country, province, city) without relying on model-generated or synthetic labels. Building on this, we introduce a lightweight reinforcement learning strategy with coordinate-aligned rewards based on Haversine distance, enabling the model to refine predictions through spatially meaningful feedback. Our approach bridges structured geographic reasoning with direct spatial supervision, yielding improved localization accuracy, stronger generalization, and more transparent inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Geo-R1, establishing a new retrieval-free paradigm for scalable and interpretable image geolocalization. To facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, both the model and code will be made publicly available.

Vision-Language Reasoning for Geolocalization: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Flawed planning from VLM-driven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, non-interactive evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot simulate dynamic risks that emerge from an agent’s actions and rely on unreliable post-hoc evaluations that ignore unsafe intermediate steps. To bridge this critical gap, we propose evaluating an agent’s interactive safety: its ability to perceive emergent risks and execute mitigation steps in the correct procedural order. We thus present IS-Bench, the first multi-modal benchmark designed for interactive safety, featuring 161 challenging scenarios with 388 unique safety risks instantiated in a high-fidelity simulator. Crucially, it facilitates a novel process-oriented evaluation that verifies whether risk mitigation actions are performed before/after specific risk-prone steps. Extensive experiments on 16 leading VLMs, including the GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5 series, reveal that current agents lack interactive safety awareness. While safety-aware Chain-of-Thought can improve performance, it often compromises task completion. By highlighting these critical limitations, IS-Bench provides a foundation for developing safer and more reliable embodied AI systems.

IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household Tasks

With the rapid advancement and strong generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs), 
they have been increasingly incorporated into the active learning pipelines as annotators to reduce annotation costs. 
However, considering the annotation quality, labels generated by LLMs often fall short of real-world applicability.
To address this, we propose a novel active learning framework, Mixture of LLMs in the Loop Active Learning, 
replacing human annotators with labels generated through a Mixture-of-LLMs-based annotation model, aimed at enhancing LLM-based annotation robustness by aggregating the strengths of multiple LLMs. 
To further mitigate the impact of the noisy labels, 
we introduce annotation discrepancy and negative learning to identify the unreliable annotations and enhance learning affectiveness.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves performance comparable to human annotation and consistently outperforms single-LLM baselines and other LLM-ensemble-based approaches. 
Moreover, our framework is built on lightweight LLMs, enabling it to operate fully on local machines in real-world applications.

Next Generation Active Learning: Mixture of LLMs in the Loop

Open-set object detection (OSOD) aims to recognize known object categories while localizing previously unseen instances. However, real-world scenarios often involve co-occurring domain shifts and novel object categories. Existing OSOD methods typically overlook domain shifts, relying on source-trained representations that entangle domain-specific style with semantic content, thereby hindering generalization to both unseen domains and novel categories. To address this challenge, we propose a unified framework, termed DecOmpose and ATtribute (DOAT), which disentangles domain-specific style from semantic structure, thereby facilitating generalizable object detection. DOAT employs wavelet-based feature decomposition to separate style information from high-frequency structural details, thus enabling an explicit separation of domain and category shifts. To account for domain shift, the low-frequency components are perturbed within a style subspace to simulate diverse domain appearances. For unknown object discovery, the high-frequency components are utilized to estimate objectness scores via an attribution mechanism that fuses wavelet energy with semantic distance to known-category prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard open-set benchmarks have demonstrated the superior generalization performance of DOAT.

Decompose and Attribute: Boosting Generalizable Open-Set Object Detection via Objectness Score

Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial step in enhancing the quality of HSIs. Noise modeling methods can fit noise distributions to generate synthetic HSIs to train denoising networks. However, the noise in captured HSIs is usually complex and difficult to model accurately, which significantly limits the effectiveness of these approaches. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{multi-stage noise-decoupling framework}$ that decomposes complex noise into explicitly modeled and implicitly modeled components. This decoupling reduces the complexity of noise and enhances the learnability of HSI denoising methods when applied to real paired data.
Specifically, for $\textbf{explicitly modeled noise}$, we utilize an existing noise model to generate paired data for pre-training a denoising network, equipping it with prior knowledge to handle the explicitly modeled noise effectively. For $\textbf{implicitly modeled noise}$, we introduce a high-frequency wavelet guided network. Leveraging the prior knowledge from the pre-trained module, this network adaptively extracts high-frequency features to target and remove the implicitly modeled noise from real paired HSIs. Furthermore, to effectively eliminate all noise components and mitigate error accumulation across stages, a $\textbf{multi-stage learning strategy}$, comprising separate pre-training and joint fine-tuning, is employed to optimize the entire framework. Extensive experiments on public and our captured datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively handling complex real-world noise and significantly enhancing HSI quality.

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FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models

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