Singapore

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction but still face the fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they generate erroneous or fabricated information. 
Most existing research induces hallucinations by manually perturbing visual or instruction inputs, then uses output differences or model-generated descriptions as references to mitigate hallucinations and improve response-visual consistency. However, these methods are constrained by model capabilities and prone to hallucination propagation.
We propose Visual Clue Guided Decoding (VCGD), a novel decoding strategy that introduces an auxiliary captioning model to generate precise visual clues during decoding for guiding model generation. It further incorporates image confidence constraints to critically suppress hallucination propagation during generation, thereby significantly improving content reliability and visual consistency. Specifically, VCGD leverages high-quality visual descriptions to guide MLLMs in correcting perceptual biases while generating answers. Furthermore, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning (RL-based training paradigm for the Caption Model, in which a Reward Agent provides feedback on the quality of visual clues, further enhancing the accuracy of visual information.
Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrate that VCGD significantly reduces hallucination rates and substantially improves cross-modal consistency. Our method exhibits strong generalizability and scalability, offering an effective decoding enhancement strategy that can be seamlessly integrated into existing multimodal frameworks.

AAAI 2026

VCGD: Visual Clue Guided Decoding with Caption Model for Mitigating Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models

multimodal large language models

hallucinations

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.

Detecting Schelling Points—salient 3D mesh landmarks that serve as natural reference points for shape analysis—is a challenging problem in geometry processing. While existing CNN-based methods struggle with limited receptive fields and poor geometric context modeling, this paper proposes {\em SchellingFormer}, a novel Laplacian matrix-guided Geometric Transformer that effectively captures long-range dependencies and discriminative geometric features for robust Schelling point prediction. Our framework consists of two key components: (i) a hybrid geometric feature embedding module that integrates handcrafted descriptors (coordinates, Gaussian curvature, and curvature differences) to encode local geometry, and (ii) a Laplacian-driven vector attention mechanism, where spatial relationships encoded by the Laplacian matrix guide feature aggregation with the Transformer. This approach enables adaptive, geometry-aware message passing and contextual representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SchellingFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Our work bridges the gap between spectral mesh analysis and Transformer-based learning, offering a powerful tool for 3D shape understanding tasks such as shape matching and saliency detection.

SchellingFormer: Laplacian Matrix-guided Geometric Transformer for Robust Schelling Point Detection

Deep learning-based methods have achieved a breakthrough in image anomaly detection, but their complexity introduces a considerable challenge to understanding why an instance is predicted to be anomalous. We introduce a novel explanation method that generates multiple alternative modifications for each anomaly, capturing diverse concepts of anomalousness. Each modification is trained to be perceived as normal by the anomaly detector. The method provides a semantic explanation of the mechanism that triggered the detector, allowing users to explore ``what-if scenarios.'' Qualitative and quantitative analyses across various image datasets demonstrate that applying this method to state-of-the-art detectors provides high-quality semantic explanations.

Reimagining Anomalies: What If Anomalies Were Normal?

We study how the design of testing institutions, encompassing both the tests themselves and the procedures used to administer them, shapes selection outcomes in environments with multiple criteria and strategic agents.
We model the testing agency as either a set of independent bureaucracies (each test administered separately) or a joint bureaucracy (where test order and personalization can be coordinated). Our mechanism design analysis shows that under a joint bureaucracy, fixed-order sequential mechanisms with stringent tests are optimal for maximizing the probability mass of qualified candidates selected. Furthermore, we demonstrate that personalizing tests through upfront communication, now increasingly feasible via AI and automation, can select all qualified candidates.
Finally, we compare institutional settings and quantify the value of controlling test order, showing that the benefit depends critically on the distribution of testees and the stringency of optimal tests. Our results contribute to the design of robust, efficient, and fair testing systems in both human and AI-mediated environments.

Testing Under Strategic Manipulation: Mechanism Design for Human and AI Institutions

Future superhuman models will surpass the ability of humans and humans will only be able to \textit{weakly} supervise superhuman models.
To alleviate the issue of lacking high-quality data for model alignment, some works on weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) finetune a strong pretrained model with a weak supervisor so that it can generalize beyond weak supervision.
However, the invariable use of weak supervision in existing methods exposes issues in robustness, with a proportion of weak labels proving harmful to models.
In this paper, we propose a selective W2SG framework to avoid using weak supervision when unnecessary.
We train a binary classifier P(IK) to identify questions that a strong model can answer and use its self-generated labels for alignment.
We further refine weak labels with a graph smoothing method.
Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms competitive baselines.
Further analyses show that P(IK) can generalize across tasks and difficulties, which indicates selective W2SG can help superalignment.

Selective Weak-to-Strong Generalization

While deep generative models have significantly advanced representation learning, they may inherit or amplify biases and fairness issues by encoding sensitive attributes alongside predictive features. Enforcing strict independence in disentanglement is often unrealistic when target and sensitive factors are naturally correlated. To address this challenge, we propose CAD-VAE(Correlation-Aware Disentangled VAE), which introduces a correlated latent code to capture the information shared between the target and sensitive attributes. Given this correlated latent, our method effectively separates overlapping factors without extra domain knowledge by directly minimizing the conditional mutual information between target and sensitive codes. A relevance-driven optimization strategy refines the correlated code by efficiently capturing essential correlated features and eliminating redundancy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CAD-VAE produces fairer representations, realistic counterfactuals, and improved fairness-aware image editing.

CAD-VAE: Leveraging Correlation-Aware Latents for Comprehensive Fair Disentanglement

Contrastive pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, demonstrate strong generalization abilities in zero-shot classification by leveraging embeddings extracted from image and text encoders. This paper aims to robustly fine-tune these vision-language models on in-distribution (ID) data without compromising their generalization abilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and zero-shot settings. Current robust fine-tuning methods tackle this challenge by reusing contrastive learning, which was used in pre-training, for fine-tuning. However, we found that these methods distort the geometric structure of the embeddings, which plays a crucial role in the generalization of vision-language models, resulting in limited OOD and zero-shot performance. To address this, we propose Difference Vector Equalization (DiVE), which preserves the geometric structure during fine-tuning. The idea behind DiVE is to constrain difference vectors, each of which is obtained by subtracting the embeddings extracted from the pre-trained and fine-tuning models for the same data sample. By constraining the difference vectors to be equal across various data samples, we effectively preserve the geometric structure.
Therefore, we introduce two losses: average vector loss (AVL) and pairwise vector loss (PVL). AVL preserves the geometric structure globally by constraining difference vectors to be equal to their weighted average. PVL preserves the geometric structure locally by ensuring a consistent multimodal alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that DiVE effectively preserves the geometric structure, achieving strong results across ID, OOD, and zero-shot metrics.

Difference Vector Equalization for Robust Fine-tuning of Vision-Language Models

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced intelligent systems. Unfortunately, LLMs often face knowledge conflicts between internal memory and retrieved external information, arising from misinformation, biases, or outdated knowledge. These conflicts undermine response reliability and introduce uncertainty in decision-making. In this work, we analyze how LLMs navigate knowledge conflicts from an information-theoretic perspective and reveal that when conflicting and supplementary information exhibit significant differences, LLMs confidently resolve their preferences and alleviate the uncertainty during their response generation. When this difference is ambiguous, LLMs experience considerable uncertainty about their generation. Based on this insight, we propose Swin-VIB, a novel framework that integrates a pipeline of variational information bottleneck models to adapt the retrieved information difference, facilitating robust response generation of LLMs even in conflicting contexts. Extensive experiments confirm our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the performance of Swin-VIB. Notably, Swin-VIB outperforms all competitive baselines in terms of the accuracy of the multiple-choice task, while improving the EM values in the open-ended QA task by at least 11.14%.

Accommodate Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-augmented LLMs: Towards Robust Response Generation in the Wild

This paper presents a novel strategy for a multi-agent pursuit-evasion game involving multiple faster pursuers with heterogenous speeds and a single slower evader. We define a geometric region, the evader's safe-reachable set, as the intersection of Apollonius circles derived from each pursuer-evader pair. The capture strategy is formulated as a zero-sum differential game where the pursuers cooperatively minimize the area of this set, while the evader seeks to maximize it, effectively playing a game of spatial containment. By deriving the analytical gradients of the safe-reachable set's area with respect to agent positions, we obtain closed-form, instantaneous optimal control laws for the heading of each agent. These strategies are computationally efficient, allowing for real-time implementation. Simulations demonstrate that the gradient-based controls effectively steer the pursuers to systematically shrink the evader’s safe region, leading to guaranteed capture. This area-minimization approach provides a clear geometric objective for cooperative capture.

Area-Optimal Control Strategies for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Pursuit

The recent introduction of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly advanced novel view synthesis. Several studies have further improved the rendering quality of 3DGS, yet they still exhibit noticeable visual discrepancies when synthesizing views at sampling rates unseen during training. Specifically, they suffer from (i) erosion-induced blurring artifacts when zooming in and (ii) dilation-induced staircase artifacts when zooming out. We speculate that these artifacts arise from the fundamental limitation of the alpha blending adopted in 3DGS methods. Instead of the conventional alpha blending that computes alpha and transmittance as scalar quantities over a pixel, we propose to replace it with our novel Gaussian Blending that treats alpha and transmittance as spatially varying distributions. Thus, transmittances can be updated considering the spatial distribution of alpha values across the pixel area, allowing nearby background splats to contribute to final rendering. Our Gaussian Blending is applicable to any 3DGS variants, and maintain real-time rendering speed with no extra memory cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaussian Blending effectively captures fine details at various sampling rates unseen during training, consistently outperforming existing novel view synthesis models across both unseen and seen sampling rates. We will publicly release our code upon acceptance.

Gaussian Blending: Rethinking Alpha Blending in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Sound effect editing—modifying audio by adding, removing, or replacing elements—remains constrained by existing approaches that rely solely on low-level signal processing or coarse text prompts, often resulting in limited flexibility and suboptimal audio quality. To address this, we propose AV-Edit, a generative sound effect editing framework that enables fine-grained editing of existing audio tracks in videos by jointly leveraging visual, audio, and text semantics. Specifically, the proposed method employs a specially designed contrastive audio-visual masking autoencoder (CAV-MAE-Edit) for multimodal pre-training, learning aligned cross-modal representations. These representations are then used to train an editorial Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) capable of removing visually irrelevant sounds and generating missing audio elements consistent with video content through a correlation-based training strategy. Furthermore, we construct a dedicated video-based sound editing dataset as an evaluation benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed AV-Edit generates high-quality audio with precise modifications based on visual content and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the field of sound effect editing and audio generation.

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SchellingFormer: Laplacian Matrix-guided Geometric Transformer for Robust Schelling Point Detection

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Through the Magnifying Glass: Adaptive Perception Magnification for Hallucination-Free VLM Decoding