Singapore

Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical tool for removing sensitive or personal information from machine learning models, empowering individuals with the right to be forgotten. While MU has achieved success in classification and generative tasks, whether this technique can be effectively applied to segmentation foundation models remains uncertain. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method, Selective Concept Unlearning (SCU), to unlearn the segmentation capability of target concepts. SCU consists of several key aspects: (1) The Multi-level Forgetting Module, designed with a hierarchical three-level suppression strategy, including (i) distillation-level: Negative distillation steers model’s output distribution away from teacher’s correct outputs, erasing its learned concept recognition. (ii) attention-level: Attention suppression minimizes model’s attention to target regions. (iii) output-level: Directly erases predictions for the target by relabeling as background. (2) The Preservation Module ensures maintaining segmentation quality for non-target concepts. Additionally, we introduce a set of metrics to evaluate segmentation unlearning methods. Experiments demonstrate that SCU consistently outperforms existing baselines. We will release our code in the near future.

AAAI 2026

Forget What Has Seen: Selective Concept Unlearning in Segmentation Foundation Models

peai: privacy & security

ml: privacy

cv: bias

fairness & privacy

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

[![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/b087f8a4dc5816d6e1a6514e59c59ac3.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T96GzPqObXrMln2BMByCSXTSizjTg69P/view?usp=sharing)

You need to log in with the email address you registered with. Access credentials have been sent to your email. 

Please be sure to check your spam and other email folders if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in to explore this event.

To access NAACL 2025 event page you are required to register. Please follow [**this link**](https://2025.naacl.org/registration/registration/) to register. Access will depend on your registration type.

Please register!

NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

Solving the model counting problem #SAT, asking for the number of satisfying assignments of a propositional formula, has been explored intensively and has gathered its own community. While most existing solvers are based on knowledge compilation, another promising approach is through contraction in tensor hypernetworks. 
We perform a theoretical proof-complexity analysis of this approach. For this, we design two new tensor-based proof systems that we show to tightly correspond to tensor-based #SAT solving. We determine the simulation order of #SAT proof systems and prove exponential separations between the systems. This sheds light on the relative performance of different #SAT solving approaches.

Proof Systems for Tensor-based Model Counting

This paper revisits fairness-aware interactive recommendation (e.g., TikTok, KuaiShou) by introducing a novel control knob, i.e., the lifecycle of items. We make threefold contributions. First, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis and uncover that item lifecycles in short-video platforms follow a compressed three-phase pattern, i.e., rapid growth, transient stability, and sharp decay, which significantly deviates from the classical four-stage model (introduction, growth, maturity, decline). Second, we introduce LHRL, a lifecycle-aware hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that dynamically harmonizes fairness and accuracy by leveraging phase-specific exposure dynamics. LHRL consists of two key components: (1) PhaseFormer, a lightweight encoder combining STL decomposition and attention mechanisms for robust phase detection; (2) a two-level HRL agent, where the high-level policy imposes phase-aware fairness constraints, and the low-level policy optimizes immediate user engagement. This decoupled optimization allows for effective reconciliation between long-term equity and short-term utility. Third, experiments on multiple real-world interactive recommendation datasets demonstrate that LHRL significantly improves both fairness and user engagement. Furthermore, the integration of lifecycle-aware rewards into existing RL-based models consistently yields performance gains, highlighting the generalizability and practical value of our approach.

Revisiting Fairness-aware Interactive Recommendation: Item Lifecycle as a Control Knob

Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence across numerous domains, yet their transformative potential remains largely untapped in Extreme Multi-label Classification (XMC). Queries in XMC are associated with relevant labels from extremely large label spaces, where it is critical to strike a balance between efficiency and performance. Therefore, many recent approaches efficiently pose XMC as a maximum inner product search between embeddings learned from small encoder-only transformer architectures. In this paper, we address two important aspects in XMC: how to effectively harness larger decoder-only models, and how to exploit visual information while maintaining computational efficiency. We demonstrate that both play a critical role in XMC separately and can be combined for improved performance. We show that a few billion-size decoder model can deliver substantial improvements while keeping computational overhead manageable. Furthermore, our Vision-enhanced eXtreme Multi-label Learning framework (ViXML) efficiently integrates foundation vision models by pooling a single embedding per image. This limits computational growth while unlocking multi-modal capabilities. Remarkably, ViXML with small encoders outperforms text-only decoder models in most cases, showing that an image is worth billions of parameters. Finally, we present an extension of existing text-only datasets to exploit visual metadata and make them available to the community for future benchmarking. Comprehensive experiments across four public text-only datasets and their corresponding image enhanced versions validate our proposals' effectiveness, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by up to +8.21\% in P@1 on the largest dataset.

Large Language Models Meet Extreme Multi-label Classification: Scaling and Multi-modal Framework

Prediction of pedestrian behavior is crucial for autonomous driving systems and intelligent transportation.Conventional methods predict the behavior based solely on either the pedestrian intention or the distance-related interactions between the pedestrian and its surroundings. However, these methods overlook the associations between intention and interaction for behavior prediction, in which they should be aligned with each other, thus leading to sub-optimal predictions. To solve this problem, we propose to predict the behavior by learning the association between intention and interaction, enabling them to mutually enhance each other during the prediction. Specifically, we first predict the short-term intention of all objects, including the target pedestrian and its surroundings.Then, instead of using the distance-related interactions, we predict the interactions by learning the correlated intentions. Finally, the intention-driven interactions refine the initial intention prediction, thus ensuring the alignment between intention and interaction for behavior prediction. We evaluate our method on two downstream tasks, the pedestrian trajectory prediction and pedestrian intention estimation, and show that it outperforms all the existing methods.

Understanding Interaction as You Need: Intention-Driven Pedestrian Behavior Prediction

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) embedded with expansive representations and visual concepts have showcased significant potential in image and text understanding. Efficiently adapting VLMs such as CLIP to downstream tasks like few-shot image classification has garnered growing attention, with prompt learning emerging as a representative approach. However, most existing prompt-based adaptation methods, which rely solely on coarse-grained textual prompts, suffer from limited performance and interpretability when handling domain tasks that require specific knowledge. This results in a failure to satisfy the stringent trustworthiness requirements of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in high-risk scenarios like healthcare. To address this issue, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Explainable Prompting (KEEP) framework that leverages fine-grained domain-specific knowledge to enhance the adaptation process of VLMs across various domains and image modalities. By incorporating retrieval augmented generation and domain foundation models, our framework can provide more reliable image-wise knowledge for prompt learning in various domains, alleviating the lack of fine-grained annotations, while offering both visual and textual explanations. Extensive experiments and explainability analyses conducted on eight datasets of different domains and image modalities demonstrate that our method simultaneously achieves superior performance and interpretability, highlighting the effectiveness of the collaboration between foundation models and XAI. The code will be made publicly available.

Knowledge-Enhanced Explainable Prompting for Vision-Language Models

Binary networked public goods games model situations in which players can choose whether to participate in an action at some cost which benefits players in their immediate vicinity within some typically social or infrastructural network.
An important underlying assumption for this model is that participation in an action impacts *the entire* vicinity of participating players.
However, there are numerous natural settings in which participation influences only a subset of the neighbors and is in fact more "interaction-specific''.
In this work, we introduce a type of game that is more appropriate in such settings. 
We initiate the investigation of these games, by studying the complexity of deciding existence of their Nash equilibria in general and with respect to well-motivated structural restrictions on the network.
The outcome is a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of computing Nash equilibria with respect to any combination of three natural properties of the network structure.

Edge-Binary Public Goods Games

Step-wise explanations can explain logic puzzles and other satisfaction problems by showing how to derive decisions step by step. Each step consists of a set of constraints that derive an assignment to one or more decision variables. However, many candidate explanation steps exist, with different sets of constraints and different decisions they derive. To identify the most comprehensible one, a user-defined objective function is required to quantify the quality of each step. However, defining a good objective function is challenging. Here, interactive preference elicitation methods from the wider machine learning community can offer a way to learn user preferences from pairwise comparisons. We investigate the feasibility of this approach for step-wise explanations and address several limitations that distinguish it from elicitation for standard combinatorial problems. First, because the explanation quality is measured using multiple sub-objectives that can vary a lot in scale, we propose two dynamic normalization techniques to rescale these features and stabilize the learning process. We also observed that many generated comparisons involve similar explanations. For this reason, we introduce MACHOP (Multi-Armed CHOice Perceptron), a novel query generation strategy that integrates non-domination constraints with upper confidence bound-based diversification. We evaluate the elicitation techniques on Sudokus and Logic-Grid puzzles using artificial users, and validate them with a real-user evaluation. In both settings, MACHOP consistently produces higher-quality explanations than the standard approach.

Preference Elicitation for Step-Wise Explanations in Logic Puzzles

Stringent regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandate that an application's code-level data handling must align with its natural-language privacy policy, creating a critical auditing challenge. However, existing methods, predominantly reliant on static analysis, suffer from a critical limitation: in their pursuit of soundness via over-approximation, they exhibit "semantic blindness"—detecting what data flows exist but not why. This leads to an overwhelming volume of false positives, rendering automated auditing impractical. To bridge this gap, we introduce PriAgent, a novel framework that approaches compliance auditing as a multi-stage, AI-driven reasoning task. Instead of a monolithic model, PriAgent deploys a team of specialized agents that execute a divide-and-conquer strategy. They systematically prune the analysis space by abstracting data flows, pinpoint semantic loci critical for inspection, and perform on-demand summarization of large code blocks to ensure scalability. PriAgent leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a curated knowledge base of Android APIs, equipping agents to discern potentially non-compliant behavior from benign functionality. By correlating code-level evidence with the app's stated privacy policy, PriAgent delivers a holistic and explainable verdict for each potential violation. Our evaluations demonstrate that PriAgent significantly reduces false positives, enabling a more scalable and precise compliance audit.

PriAgent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Auditing Android Privacy Compliance

Property-constrained molecular generation and editing are crucial in AI-driven drug discovery but remain hindered by two factors: (i) capturing the complex relationships between molecular structures and multiple properties remains challenging, and (ii) the narrow range and incomplete annotations of molecular properties limit the effectiveness of models that rely heavily on property information. To tackle these limitations, we propose HSPAG, a data-efficient framework featuring hierarchical structure–property alignment. By treating SMILES and molecular properties as complementary modalities, the model learns their relationships at atom, substructure, and whole-molecule levels during pre-training, thereby implicitly encoding property information into molecular representations. Moreover, we select representative samples through scaffold clustering and hard samples via an auxiliary variational auto-encoder (VAE), substantially reducing the required pre-training data. In addition, we incorporate a property relevance-aware masking mechanism and diversified perturbation strategies to enhance generation quality under sparse annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that HSPAG effectively models complex molecular characteristics to capture fine-grained structure–property insights, enabling controllable molecular generation under multiple property constraints. Two real-world case studies further validate the editing capabilities of HSPAG, highlighting its practical potential in lead compound screening and optimization.

Hierarchical Structure-Property Alignment for Data-Efficient Molecular Generation and Editing

In few-shot learning, utilizing local and global geometric priors to capture both subtle local class metrics and coarse global structures within the meta-task are important to obtain discriminative embeddings. However, existing graph-based and curvature-based few-shot approaches only focus on either one kind of geometric prior but neglect the other. To effectively utilize the pros of these two paradigms, we propose a novel Dual-Geometry Graph Network (DGGN) to adaptively integrate the local and global geometric priors via two key pathways. Specifically, the local-wise metric modeling pathway utilizes Ollivier-Ricci curvature to capture task-specific local class metrics among the instances, and the global-wise connectivity modeling pathway utilizes resistive embedding to capture global instance distributions and connectivity patterns of the entire meta-task. In addition, we introduce two new regularization loss functions to explicitly enhance the geometric representation ability of the local and global pathways respectively. We validate that DGGN's superior performance stems from its adaptively topological refinements by measuring the graph edit distance, demonstrating its ability to match the underlying data distribution. Extensive experiments show that DGGN sets a new state-of-the-art on standard, cross-domain, and semi-supervised few-shot benchmarks. Code is available in our Supplementary Material.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Proof Systems for Tensor-based Model Counting

Similar lecture

Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Proof Systems for Tensor-based Model Counting

Similar lecture

Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs

Downloads