Singapore

Listwise reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as the state-of-the-art approach, consistently establishing new performance benchmarks in passage reranking. However, their practical application faces two critical hurdles: the prohibitive computational overhead and high latency of processing long token sequences, and the performance degradation caused by phenomena like &quot;lost in the middle&quot; in long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce Compress-then-Rank (C2R), an efficient framework that performs listwise reranking not on original passages, but on their compact multi-vector surrogates. These surrogates can be pre-computed and cached for all passages in the corpus. The effectiveness of C2R hinges on three key innovations. First, the compressor model is pre-trained on a combination of text restoration and continuation objectives, enabling high-fidelity compressed vector sequences that mitigate the semantic loss common in single-vector methods. Second, a novel input scheme prepends embeddings of each ordinal index (e.g., [1]:) to its corresponding compressed vector sequence, which both delineates passage boundaries and guides the reranker LLM to generate a ranked list. Finally, the compressor and reranker are jointly optimized, making the compression explicitly ranking-aware for the ranking objective. Extensive experiments on major reranking benchmarks demonstrate that C2R provides substantial speedups while achieving competitive and even superior ranking performance compared to full-text reranking methods. The related code is provided in the supplementary materials.

AAAI 2026

Compress-then-Rank: Faster and Better Listwise Reranking with Large Language Models via Ranking-Aware Passage Compression

nlp: (large) language models

nlp: applications

ml: learning preferences or rankings

## 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.

Listwise reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as the state-of-the-art approach, consistently establishing new performance benchmarks in passage reranking. However, their practical application faces two critical hurdles: the prohibitive computational overhead and high latency of processing long token sequences, and the performance degradation caused by phenomena like "lost in the middle" in long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce Compress-then-Rank (C2R), an efficient framework that performs listwise reranking not on original passages, but on their compact multi-vector surrogates. These surrogates can be pre-computed and cached for all passages in the corpus. The effectiveness of C2R hinges on three key innovations. First, the compressor model is pre-trained on a combination of text restoration and continuation objectives, enabling high-fidelity compressed vector sequences that mitigate the semantic loss common in single-vector methods. Second, a novel input scheme prepends embeddings of each ordinal index (e.g., [1]:) to its corresponding compressed vector sequence, which both delineates passage boundaries and guides the reranker LLM to generate a ranked list. Finally, the compressor and reranker are jointly optimized, making the compression explicitly ranking-aware for the ranking objective. Extensive experiments on major reranking benchmarks demonstrate that C2R provides substantial speedups while achieving competitive and even superior ranking performance compared to full-text reranking methods. The related code is provided in the supplementary materials.

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.

Inspired by Segment Anything 2, which generalizes segmentation from images to videos, we propose SAM2MOT—a novel segmentation-driven paradigm for multi-object tracking that breaks away from the conventional detection-association framework. In contrast to previous approaches that treat segmentation as auxiliary information, SAM2MOT places it at the heart of the tracking process, systematically tackling challenges like false positives and occlusions. Its effectiveness has been thoroughly validated on major MOT benchmarks. Furthermore, SAM2MOT integrates pre-trained detector, pre-trained segmentor with tracking logic into a zero-shot MOT system that requires no fine-tuning. This significantly reduces dependence on labeled data and paves the way for transitioning MOT research from task-specific solutions to general-purpose systems. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT.

SAM2MOT: A Novel Paradigm of Multi-Object Tracking by Segmentation

The rapid expansion of materials databases offers unprecedented opportunities for accelerating materials discovery via machine learning. However, the widespread assumption that larger datasets inherently produce better models does not hold in practice. We propose FUSION (**F**using **U**ncertainty with **S**tructural **I**nformation for **O**ptimal **N**eural training), an offline dataset pruning strategy that synergistically combines uncertainty quantification with crystallographic structure analysis via geometric fingerprinting, framing dataset pruning as a discrete optimization problem. Through evaluation across 3 benchmark datasets, FUSION consistently outperforms baselines, including random pruning, uncertainty sampling, weighting factor pruning, diversity sampling, and active learning. It demonstrates robust transferability across 11 diverse architectures, outperforming random pruning by 1.91–13.65\% across different datasets, with an average improvement of 6.36\%. Moreover, our analysis suggests that different models exhibit varying robustness characteristics when faced with pruned training data, highlighting the importance of model selection tailored to dataset composition. We identify optimal pruning points where removing just 0–8\% of training data improves model performance, yielding gains up to 12.67\% in specific model–dataset combinations. These results establish a new paradigm for materials informatics that prioritizes data quality over quantity, offering a pathway toward more efficient and sustainable machine learning workflows in computational materials science.

FUSION: Dataset Pruning via Fusing Uncertainty with Structural Information for Optimal Neural Training in Crystal Property Prediction

Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel target objects with the guidance of minimal annotated reference examples. 
The affinity-based method has great advantages in the FSS inference stage for both specialist model and foundation model. However, current affinity calculation merely relies on only support-query matching, without considering the query-specific semantic or the semantic correlation among inter-support samples, which limits the representation ability of affinity map. In this paper, we propose the Generalizing Semantic Mining (GSM) that focuses on exploiting generalizing semantic to improve the affinity calculation. Concretely, we first organize the affinity-based inference into three main steps to reveal the crucial role of affinity map. To address the low-data problem, Target Semantic Reusing module considers the query sample as a proxy reference and assigns it with proxy mask identifying its most generalizing semantic regions. Then, to generate the high-fidelity proxy mask, Query-specific Semantic Modeling module pinpoints the most generalizing regions through prior semantic analysis. Finally, Representative Re-weighting module explicitly modulates affinity calculation via generalization-aware weighting. Experiments on FSS benchmarks demonstrate that our GSM can serve as a plug-and-play free lunch for both specialist models and foundation models.

Training-free Boosting for Few-shot Segmentation via Generalizing Semantic Mining

Structured mesh generation serves as a crucial preprocessing step in numerical simulations and can be formulated as a mapping problem from geometry to structured mesh. Existing approaches typically establish an isolated mapping for each geometry. This geometry-specific paradigm fails to capture and leverage commonalities across geometries, inevitably requiring recomputation or costly retraining for new geometries. To overcome this limitation, we propose ICL-Mesh, a meta-learning framework based on in-context learning (ICL) for structured mesh generation. It treats learning one mapping as one task and trains a single neural network to extract commonalities across tasks and learn from in-context examples within each task, enabling rapid generalization to unseen tasks without parameter updates. Experimental results demonstrate that ICL-Mesh effectively generalizes to diverse geometries with only a few context examples, and even without examples. It also exhibits robustness to in-context example order sensitivity and can be extended to various mesh generation scenarios, including mesh refinement and coarsening.

Learning to Generate Structured Meshes with In-Context: Toward Generalization in Mesh Generation

Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages such as high temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range. However, their limited spatial resolution poses challenges for fine-grained perception tasks. In this work, we propose an ultra-lightweight, stream-based event-to-event super-resolution method based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), designed for real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices. To further reduce model size, we introduce a novel Dual-Forward Polarity-Split Event Encoding strategy that decouples positive and negative events into separate forward paths through a shared SNN. Furthermore, we propose a Learnable Spatio-temporal Polarity-aware Loss (LearnSTPLoss) that adaptively balances temporal, spatial, and polarity consistency using learnable uncertainty-based weights. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive super-resolution performance on multiple datasets while significantly reducing model size and inference time. The lightweight design enables embedding the module into event cameras or using it as an efficient front-end preprocessing for downstream vision tasks.

Ultralight Polarity-Split Neuromorphic SNN for Event-Stream Super-Resolution

Guidance is an emerging concept that improves the empirical performance of real-time, sub-optimal multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) methods. It offers additional information to MAPF algorithms to mitigate congestion on a global scale by considering the collective behavior of all agents across the entire workspace. This global perspective helps reduce agents' waiting times, thereby improving overall coordination efficiency. In contrast, this study explores an alternative approach: providing local guidance in the vicinity of each agent. While such localized methods involve recomputation as agents move and may appear computationally demanding, we empirically demonstrate that supplying informative spatiotemporal cues to the planner can significantly improve solution quality without exceeding a moderate time budget. When applied to LaCAM, a leading configuration-based solver, this form of guidance establishes a new performance frontier for MAPF.

Local Guidance for Configuration-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Quantization is a pivotal technique for enhancing communication efficiency in Federated Learning (FL). Traditional quantization methods often set uniform intervals, may fail to adequately characterize non-uniform data distributions, thus leading to substantial estimation errors and degrated model performance. Non-uniform quantization can better solve the problem. However, when applied to FL, it would bring additional communication overheads for the alignment of parameter distributions among distributed models. To address this issue, we propose Bisection Interval Quantization (BIQ), a novel non-uniform quantization framework for FL with great communication efficiency. In particular, BIQ works by optimizing the interval selection through recursive bisection among distributed clients without extra parameter communication. For scenarios involving amounts of boundary inputs, we further design Weighted Bisection Interval Quantization (WBIQ), which incorporates maximum likelihood estimation to refine boundary value reconstruction to enhance the estimation quality of boundary inputs. Our theoretical analysis rigorously establishes, for the first time under biased quantization conditions, that both BIQ and WBIQ achieve tighter error bounds and enhanced stability. Extensive experiments validate that both BIQ and WBIQ significantly accelerate the convergence of FL model training when compared to the state-of-the-art quantizers under both convex and non-convex settings.

BIQ: Bisection Interval Quantization for Communication-efficient Federated Learning

Accurate prediction of compound protein interactions (CPIs) is crucial for drug discovery. 
However, existing deep learning-based methods suffer from hidden biases and poor cross-domain generalization, leading to spurious correlations and inadequate representation of unseen compound-protein pairs. 
To address these limitations, we propose FuseMine, a multimodal deep learning framework that jointly leverages molecular structures and biological sequences for reliable CPI prediction.
Specifically, FuseMine adopting a dual-representation strategy for each molecule. It employs a convolutional encoder to capture structural features, combined with pretrained large language models for extracting semantic information from sequences. We propose a novel Multi-modal Feature Orchestration Aggregation (MFOA) module that enables deep and synergistic fusion between the structural features and the sequential semantics of molecules, effectively capturing the complementary patterns across modalities. Additionally, we design a Reduction Differential Feature Mining (RDFM) module to further enhance the representation of discriminative features, thereby improving the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both intra-domain and cross-domain scenarios. These results highlight the synergistic value of combining structural and sequential data for CPIs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FuseMine.

FuseMine: Robust Multi-Modal Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction via Differential Attention Feature Mining

Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars can measure subtle chest wall oscillations to enable non-contact heartbeat sensing. However, traditional radar-based heartbeat sensing methods face performance degradation due to noise. Learning-based radar methods achieve better noise robustness but require costly labeled signals for supervised training. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first unsupervised framework for radar-based heartbeat sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast (Radar-APLANC). We propose to use both the heartbeat range and noise range within the radar range matrix to construct the positive and negative samples, respectively, for improved noise robustness. Our Noise-Contrastive Triplet (NCT) loss only utilizes positive samples, negative samples, and pseudo-label signals generated by the traditional radar method, thereby avoiding dependence on expensive ground-truth physiological signals. We further design a pseudo-label augmentation approach featuring adaptive noise-aware label selection to improve pseudo-label signal quality. Extensive experiments on the Equipleth dataset and our collected radar dataset demonstrate that our unsupervised method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods.

Radar-APLANC: Unsupervised Radar-based Heartbeat Sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate the design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs’ potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates the tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step, through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

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