Singapore

We introduce LOG-Nav, an efficient layout-aware object-goal navigation approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. 
By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, LOG-Nav achieves both efficient and effective navigation.
The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training.
Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85\% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79\% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40\% point improvement in SR and 60\% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios. See https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOG-Navi-012C/ for details.

AAAI 2026

LOG-Nav: Efficient Layout-Aware Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

and navigation

rob: localization

mapping

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.

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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.

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.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in graph classification tasks. However, their performance often deteriorates under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts, such as variations in graph structures, sizes, and node attributes. While several methods have been proposed to address this issue, a significant challenge remains in explicitly identifying the key components of a graph. To tackle this, we introduce CauVQ, a novel causal vector quantization method that enhances OOD generalization by explicitly identifying and leveraging causally relevant substructures. Our method first decomposes each graph into local subgraphs and quantizes them into a discrete codebook of prototypical substructures, enabling more stable and interpretable representations. To isolate truly causal substructures, we maximize their mutual information with graph labels and refine their representations through a learnable substructure interaction matrix and a causal attention mask, effectively suppressing spurious correlations. Furthermore, we design a counterfactual regularizer that enforces prediction stability under substructure perturbations, encouraging the model to focus on causal patterns rather than shortcuts. Extensive experiments on both standard and OOD graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that CauVQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and interpretability. Our framework offers a promising step towards reliable and explainable graph learning under distribution shifts.

CauVQ: Causal Vector Quantization for Graph OOD Generalization

Dataset distillation compresses large datasets into compact synthetic ones to reduce storage and computational costs. Among various approaches, distribution matching (DM)-based methods have attracted attention for their high efficiency. However, they often overlook the evolution of feature representations during training, which limits the expressiveness of synthetic data and weakens downstream performance.
To address this issue, we propose Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation (TGDD), which reformulates distribution matching as a dynamic alignment process along the model’s training trajectory. At each training stage, TGDD captures evolving semantics by aligning the feature distribution between the synthetic and original dataset. Meanwhile, it introduces a distribution constraint regularization to reduce class overlap. This design helps synthetic data preserve both semantic diversity and representativeness, improving performance in downstream tasks. Without additional optimization overhead, TGDD achieves a favorable balance between performance and efficiency. Experiments on ten datasets demonstrate that TGDD achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably a 5.0\% accuracy gain on high-resolution benchmarks. Our source code will be publicly available at http://github.com/ddrd999/TGDD.

TGDD: Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation with Balanced Distribution

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced to encompass extensive knowledge across diverse domains. Yet controlling what a LLMs should not know is important for ensuring alignment and thus safe use. However, effective unlearning in LLMs is difficult due to the fuzzy boundary between knowledge retention and forgetting. This challenge is exacerbated by entangled parameter spaces from continuous multi-domain training, often resulting in collateral damage, especially under aggressive unlearning strategies. Furthermore, the computational overhead required to optimize State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models with billions of parameters poses an additional barrier. In this work, we present **ALTER**, a lightweight unlearning framework for LLMs to address both the challenges of knowledge entanglement and unlearning efficiency. ALTER operates through two phases: (I) high entropy tokens are captured and learned via the shared A matrix in LoRA, followed by (II) an asymmetric LoRA architecture that achieves a specified forgetting objective by parameter isolation and unlearning tokens within the target subdomains. Serving as a new research direction for achieving unlearning via token-level isolation in the asymmetric framework. ALTER achieves SOTA performance on TOFU, WMDP, and MUSE benchmarks with over 95% forget quality and shows minimal side effects through preserving foundational tokens. By decoupling unlearning from LLMs' billion-scale parameters, this framework delivers excellent efficiency while preserving over 90% of model utility, exceeding baseline preservation rates of 47.8-83.6%.

ALTER: Asymmetric LoRA for Token-Entropy-Guided Unlearning of LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Large Language Models (LLMs), where adversaries can embed hidden triggers to manipulate LLM's outputs. 
Most existing defense methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, are ineffective against the autoregressive nature and vast output space of LLMs, thereby suffering from poor performance and high latency. 
To address these limitations, we investigate the behavioral discrepancies between benign and backdoored LLMs in output space.
We identify a critical phenomenon which we term sequence lock: a backdoored model generates the target sequence with abnormally high and consistent confidence compared to benign generation. 
Building on this insight, we propose $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$, a lightweight and effective detection method that monitors a sliding window of token confidences to identify sequence lock. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$ achieves a near 100\% true positive rate (TPR) and a negligible false positive rate (FPR) in the vast majority of cases.
Crucially, the $\mathtt{ConfGuard}$ enables real-time detection almost without additional latency, making it a practical backdoor defense for real-world LLM deployments.

ConfGuard: A Simple and Effective Backdoor Detection for Large Language Models

Moving infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a critical role in practical applications, such as surveillance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and UAV-based search system. Moving IRSTD still remains highly challenging due to weak target features and complex background interference. Accurate spatio-temporal feature modeling is crucial for moving target detection, typically achieved through either temporal differences or spatio-temporal (3D) convolutions. Temporal difference can explicitly leverage motion cues but exhibits limited capability in extracting spatial features, whereas 3D convolution effectively represents spatio-temporal features yet lacks explicit awareness of motion dynamics along the temporal dimension. In this paper, we propose a novel moving IRSTD network (TDCNet), which effectively extracts and enhances spatio-temporal features for accurate target detection. Specifically, we introduce a novel temporal difference convolution (TDC) re-parameterization module that comprises three parallel TDC blocks designed to capture contextual dependencies across different temporal ranges. Each TDC block fuses temporal difference and 3D convolution into a unified spatio-temporal convolution representation. This re-parameterized module can effectively capture multi-scale motion contextual features while suppressing pseudo-motion clutter in complex backgrounds, significantly improving detection performance. Moreover, we propose a TDC-guided spatio-temporal attention mechanism that performs cross-attention between the spatio-temporal features extracted from the TDC-based backbone and a parallel 3D backbone. This mechanism models their global semantic dependencies to refine the current frame’s features, thereby guiding the model to focus more accurately on critical target regions. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we construct a new challenging benchmark, IRSTD-UAV, consisting of 15,106 real infrared images with diverse low signal-to-clutter ratio scenarios and complex backgrounds. Extensive experiments on IRSTD-UAV and public infrared datasets demonstrate that our TDCNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in moving target detection. Dataset and source code will be released upon acceptance.

Spatio-Temporal Context Learning with Temporal Difference Convolution for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) from observational data is challenging due to confounding bias. Most studies tackle this bias by balancing distributions globally, but ignore individual heterogeneity and fail to capture the local structure that represents the natural clustering among individuals, which ultimately compromises ITE estimation. While instance-level alignment methods consider heterogeneity, they similarly overlook the local structure information. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end Multi-$\textbf{P}$rototype alignment method for $\textbf{ITE}$ estimation ($\textbf{PITE}$). PITE effectively captures local structure within groups and enforces cross-group alignment, thereby achieving robust ITE estimation. Specifically, we first define prototypes as cluster centroids based on similar individuals under the same treatment. To identify local similarity and the distribution consistency, we perform instance-to-prototype matching to assign individuals to the nearest prototype within groups, and design a multi-prototype alignment strategy to encourage the matched prototypes to be close across treatment arms in the latent space. PITE not only reduces distribution shift through fine-grained, prototype-level alignment, but also preserves the local structures of treated and control groups, which provides meaningful constraints for ITE estimation. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PITE outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods, achieving more accurate and robust ITE estimation.

PITE: Multi-Prototype Alignment for Individual Treatment Effect Estimation

Color polarization demosaicking (CPDM) aims to reconstruct full-resolution polarization images of four directions from the color-polarization filter array (CPFA) raw image. Due to the challenge of predicting numerous missing pixels and the scarcity of high-quality training data, existing network-based methods, despite effectively recovering scene intensity information, still exhibit significant errors in reconstructing polarization characteristics (degree of polarization, DOP, and angle of polarization, AOP). To address this problem, we introduce the image diffusion prior from text-to-image (T2I) models to overcome the performance bottleneck of network-based methods, with the additional diffusion prior compensating for limited representational capacity caused by restricted data distribution. To effectively leverage the diffusion prior, we explicitly model the polarization uncertainty during reconstruction and use uncertainty to guide the diffusion model in recovering high error regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method accurately recovers scene polarization characteristics with both high fidelity and strong visual perception.

Polarization Uncertainty-Guided Diffusion Model for Color Polarization Image Demosaicking

Affective Forecasting is an psychology task that involves predicting an individual's future emotional responses, often hampered by reliance on external factors leading to inaccuracies, and typically remains at a qualitative analysis stage. To address these challenges, we narrows the scope of Affective Forecasting by introducing the concept of Human-interaction-based Emotion Forecasting (EF). This task is set within the context of a two-party interaction, positing that an individual's emotions are significantly influenced by their interaction partner's emotional expressions and informational cues. This dynamic provides a structured perspective for exploring the patterns of emotional change, thereby enhancing the feasibility of emotion forecasting.

Hi-EF: Benchmarking Emotion Forecasting in Human-interaction

Existing vision-and-language navigation models often deviate from the correct trajectory when executing instructions. However, these models lack effective error correction capability, hindering their recovery from errors. To address this challenge, we propose Self-correction Flywheel, a novel post-training paradigm. Instead of considering the model’s error trajectories on the training set as a drawback, our paradigm emphasizes their significance as a valuable data source. We have developed a method to identify deviations in these error trajectories and devised innovative techniques to automatically generate self-correction data for perception and action. These self-correction data serve as fuel to power the model’s continued training. The brilliance of our paradigm is revealed when we re-evaluate the model on the training set, uncovering new error trajectories. At this time, the self-correction flywheel begins to spin. Through multiple flywheel iterations, we progressively enhance our monocular RGB-based VLA navigation model CorrectNav. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks show CorrectNav achieves new state-of-the-art success rates of 65.1% and 69.3%, surpassing prior best VLA navigation models by 8.2% and 16.4%. Real robot tests in various indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate \method's superior capability of error correction, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and long instruction following.

CorrectNav: Self-Correction Flywheel Empowers Vision-Language-Action Navigation Model

Black-box algorithms aim to optimize functions without access to their analytical structure or gradient information, making them essential when gradients are unavailable or computationally expensive to obtain. Traditional methods for black-box optimization (BBO) primarily utilize non-parametric models, but these approaches often struggle to scale effectively in large input spaces. Conversely, parametric approaches, which rely on neural estimators and gradient signals via backpropagation, frequently encounter substantial gradient estimation errors, limiting their reliability. Explicit Gradient Learning (EGL), a recent advancement, directly learns gradients using a first-order Taylor approximation and has demonstrated superior performance compared to both parametric and non-parametric methods. However, EGL inherently remains local and myopic, often faltering on highly non-convex optimization landscapes. In this work, we address this limitation by integrating global statistical insights from the evolutionary algorithm CMA-ES into the gradient learning framework, effectively biasing gradient estimates towards regions with higher optimization potential. Moreover, we enhance the gradient learning process by estimating the Hessian matrix, allowing us to correct the second-order residual of the Taylor series approximation. Our proposed algorithm, EvoGrad² (Evolutionary Gradient Learning with second-order approximation), achieves state-of-the-art results on the synthetic COCO test suite, exhibiting significant advantages in high-dimensional optimization problems. We further demonstrate EvoGrad²'s effectiveness in challenging real-world machine learning tasks, including adversarial training and code generation, highlighting its ability to generate more robust and high-quality solutions. Our results underscore EvoGrad\textsuperscript{2}'s potential as a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners facing complex, high-dimensional, and non-linear optimization problems.

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