Singapore

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have enabled a wide range of advanced vision-language applications, including fine-grained object recognition and contextual understanding. When querying specific regions or objects in an image, human users naturally use &quot;Visual Prompts&quot; (VP) like bounding boxes to provide reference. However, no existing benchmark systematically evaluates the ability of MLLMs to interpret such VPs. This gap raises uncertainty about whether current MLLMs can effectively recognize VPs, an intuitive prompting method for humans, and utilize them to solve problems. To address this limitation, we introduce VP-Bench, aiming to assess MLLMs’ capability in VP perception and utilization. VP-Bench employs a two-stage evaluation framework: Stage 1 examines models’ ability to perceive VPs in natural scenes, utilizing 100K visualized prompts spanning 8 shapes and 355 attribute combinations. Stage 2 investigates the impact of VPs on downstream tasks, measuring their effectiveness in real-world problem-solving scenarios. Using VP-Bench, we evaluate 21 MLLMs, including proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-source models (e.g., InternVL-2.5 and Qwen2.5-VL). In addition, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing VP understanding, such as attribute variations and model scale. VP-Bench establishes a new reference framework for studying MLLMs’ ability to comprehend and resolve grounded referring questions.

AAAI 2026

VP-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models

and transparency

large vision models

scene analysis & understanding

explainability

interpretability

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have enabled a wide range of advanced vision-language applications, including fine-grained object recognition and contextual understanding. When querying specific regions or objects in an image, human users naturally use "Visual Prompts" (VP) like bounding boxes to provide reference. However, no existing benchmark systematically evaluates the ability of MLLMs to interpret such VPs. This gap raises uncertainty about whether current MLLMs can effectively recognize VPs, an intuitive prompting method for humans, and utilize them to solve problems. To address this limitation, we introduce VP-Bench, aiming to assess MLLMs’ capability in VP perception and utilization. VP-Bench employs a two-stage evaluation framework: Stage 1 examines models’ ability to perceive VPs in natural scenes, utilizing 100K visualized prompts spanning 8 shapes and 355 attribute combinations. Stage 2 investigates the impact of VPs on downstream tasks, measuring their effectiveness in real-world problem-solving scenarios. Using VP-Bench, we evaluate 21 MLLMs, including proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-source models (e.g., InternVL-2.5 and Qwen2.5-VL). In addition, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing VP understanding, such as attribute variations and model scale. VP-Bench establishes a new reference framework for studying MLLMs’ ability to comprehend and resolve grounded referring questions.

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.

Long-tail recognition remains challenging for pre-trained foundation models like CLIP, which often suffer from performance degradation under imbalanced data. This stems not only from the overfitting/underfitting issues during fine-tuning but, more fundamentally, from the inherent bias inherited from the long-tail distribution of their massive pre-training datasets. To address this, we propose \textbf{HGLTR} (Hierarchy-Guided Long-Tail Recognition), a novel framework that calibrates pre-trained models by injecting objective class hierarchy knowledge. We argue that the semantic proximity defined by a hierarchy provides a robust, data-independent prior to counteract model bias. Our method is specifically designed for vision-language models' dual-modality architecture. At the feature level, we align image embeddings with a hierarchy-guided text similarity structure. At the classifier level, we employ a distillation loss to regularize predictions using soft labels derived from the hierarchy. This dual-level injection effectively transfers knowledge from head to tail classes. Experiments on ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist 2018 demonstrate that HGLTR achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in tail-class accuracy, highlighting the importance of leveraging structural priors to calibrate foundation models for real-world data.

HGLTR: Hierarchical Knowledge Injection for Calibrating Pre-trained Models in Long-Tail Recognition

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language models by retrieving external knowledge, often truncated into smaller chunks due to the input context window, which leads to information loss, resulting in response hallucinations and broken reasoning chains.
Moreover, traditional RAG retrieves unstructured knowledge, introducing irrelevant details that hinder accurate reasoning.
To address these issues, we propose TAdaRAG, a novel RAG framework for on-the-fly task-adaptive knowledge graph construction from external sources. 
Specifically, we design an intent-driven routing mechanism to a domain-specific extraction template, followed by supervised fine-tuning and a reinforcement learning-based implicit extraction mechanism, ensuring concise, coherent, and non-redundant knowledge integration. 
Evaluations on six public benchmarks and a real-world business benchmark (NowNewsQA) across three backbone models demonstrate that TAdaRAG outperforms existing methods across diverse domains and long-text tasks, highlighting its strong generalization and practical effectiveness.

TAdaRAG: Task Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation via On-the-Fly Knowledge Graph Construction

Federated learning (FL) has enabled training of multilingual large language models (LLMs) on diverse and decentralized multilingual data, especially on low-resource languages. To improve client-specific performance, personalization via the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules such as LoRA is common. This involves a personalization strategy (PS), such as the design of the PEFT adapter structures (e.g., in which layers to add LoRAs and what ranks) and choice of hyperparameters (e.g., learning rates) for fine-tuning. Instead of manual PS configuration, we propose FedP$^2$EFT, a federated learning-to-personalize method for multilingual LLMs in cross-device FL settings. Unlike most existing PEFT structure selection methods, which are prone to overfitting low-data regimes, FedP$^2$EFT collaboratively learns the optimal personalized PEFT structure for each client via Bayesian sparse rank selection. Evaluations on both simulated and real-world multilingual FL benchmarks demonstrate that FedP$^2$EFT largely outperforms existing personalized fine-tuning methods, while complementing other existing FL methods.

FedP²EFT: Federated Learning to Personalize PEFT for Multilingual LLMs

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emerging reasoning capabilities, current inference-time expansion methods incur prohibitive computational costs through exhaustive sampling. Through analyzing decoding trajectories, we observe that most next-token predictions align well with the golden output except a few critical tokens which leads to deviation. Inspired by this phenomenon, we propose a novel Hint-Practice Reasoning (HPR) framework that operationalizes this insight through two synergistic components: 1) a hinter (powerful LLM) that provides probabilistic guidance at critical decision points, and 2) a practitioner (efficient smaller model) that executes major reasoning steps. The framework's core innovation lies in Distributional Inconsistency Reduction (DIR), a theoretically-grounded metric that dynamically identifies intervention points by quantifying the divergence between practitioner's reasoning trajectory and hinter's expected distribution in a tree-structured probabilistic space. Through iterative tree updates guided by DIR, HPR reweights promising reasoning paths while deprioritizing low-probability branches. Experiments across arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate HPR's state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs: it achieves comparable performance to self-consistency and MCTS baselines while decoding only 1/5 tokens, and outperforms existing methods by at most 5.1% absolute accuracy while maintaining similar or lower FLOPs. Our code will be open-sourced to catalyze efficient reasoning research.

Efficient Thought Space Exploration Through Strategic Intervention

Theme detection is a fundamental task in user-centric dialogue systems, aiming to identify the latent topic of each utterance without relying on predefined schemas. Unlike intent induction, which operates within fixed label spaces, theme detection requires cross-dialogue consistency and alignment with personalized user preferences, posing significant challenges. Existing methods often struggle with sparse, short utterances for accurate topic representation and fail to capture user-level thematic preferences across dialogues. To address these challenges, we propose CATCH (Controllable Theme Detection with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation), a unified framework that integrates three core components: (1) context-aware topic representation, which enriches utterance-level semantics using surrounding topic segments; (2) preference-guided topic clustering, which jointly models semantic proximity and personalized feedback to align themes across dialogue; and (3) a hierarchical theme generation mechanism designed to suppress noise and produce robust, coherent topic labels. Experiments on a multi-domain customer dialogue benchmark (DSTC-12) demonstrate the effectiveness of CATCH with 8B LLM in both theme clustering and topic generation quality.

CATCH: A Controllable Theme Detection Framework with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation

Camera-based temporal 3D object detection has shown impressive results in autonomous driving, with offline models improving accuracy by using future frames. Knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing framework for transferring rich information from offline models to online models. However, existing KD methods overlook future frames, as they mainly focus on spatial feature distillation under strict frame alignment or on temporal relational distillation, thereby making it challenging for online models to effectively learn future knowledge. To this end, we propose a sparse query-based approach, Future Temporal Knowledge Distillation (FTKD), which effectively transfers future frame knowledge from an offline teacher model to an online student model. Specifically, we present a future-aware feature reconstruction strategy to encourage the student model to capture future features without strict frame alignment. In addition, we further introduce future-guided logit distillation to leverage the teacher's stable foreground and background context. FTKD is applied to two high-performing 3D object detection baselines, achieving up to 1.3 mAP and 1.3 NDS gains on the nuScenes dataset, as well as the most accurate velocity estimation, without increasing inference cost.

Distilling Future Temporal Knowledge with Masked Feature Reconstruction for 3D Object Detection

Knowledge Distillation (KD) serves as an effective approach to addressing heterogeneity issues in Federated Learning (FL), leveraging additional datasets to align local and global models better. There are two primary distillation paradigms: feature-based distillation, which utilizes intermediate-layer features of the network, and logit-based distillation, which employs the final layer's logit outputs. However, existing studies often select distillation methods based on intuitive and empirical evidence when facing different heterogeneous settings, neglecting the intrinsic relationship between distillation paradigms and heterogeneity. This oversight may result in suboptimal federated knowledge distillation performance under heterogeneous conditions. In this paper, we propose the \underline{C}onsolidated \underline{D}istillation for Heterogeneous \underline{Fed}erated Learning - \textbf{FedCD} that balances knowledge representations from both feature-based and logit-based distillation to enhance performance. Specifically, to address the misalignment between knowledge conveyed by features and logits, we aggregate features from different layers via cross-layer attention to preserve semantic knowledge, followed by distribution modeling using Gaussian Mixture Models. This process strengthens knowledge distillation by constraining the transformation of different network layers' features under a consolidated distribution, thereby mitigating impacts from both data and model heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedCD outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 10.72\% and validate the effectiveness of our approach.

FedCD: Towards Consolidated Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Video generation has been advancing rapidly, and diffusion transformer (DiT) based models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, their practical deployment is often hindered by slow inference speeds and high memory consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel pipelining framework named PipeDiT to accelerate video generation, which is equipped with three main innovations. First, we design a pipelining algorithm (PipeSP) for sequence parallelism (SP) to enable the computation of latent generation and communication among multiple GPUs to be pipelined, thus reducing the inference latency. Second, we propose DeDiVAE to decouple the diffusion module and the VAE module into two GPU groups whose executions can also be pipelined to reduce the memory consumption and inference latency. Third, to better utilize the GPU resources in the VAE group, we propose an attention co-processing (Aco) method to further reduce the overall video generation latency. We integrate our PipeDiT into both OpenSoraPlan and HunyuanVideo, two state-of-the-art open-source video generation frameworks, and conduct extensive experiments on two 8-GPU systems. Experimental results show that, under many common resolution and timestep configurations, our PipeDiT achieves $1.06\times$ to $4.02\times$ speedups over OpenSoraPlan and HunyuanVideo.

PipeDiT: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers in Video Generation with Task Pipelining and Model Decoupling

Modeling large-scale landscapes is a foundational yet time-consuming task in many 3D applications, typically requiring substantial expertise. Recently, Text-to-3D techniques have emerged as a promising, beginner-friendly prototyping approach for generating 3D content from textual input. However, existing methods either produce unusable, problematic geometries, or fail to fully capture the user's complex intent from the input text—making it difficult to generate high-quality landscape assets with controllable spatial and geographic features. In this paper, we present LandCraft, a novel AI-assisted authoring tool that enables the rapid creation of high-quality landscape scenes based on user descriptions. Our system employs a coarse-to-fine generation process: Initially, large language and deep generative models concretize textual ideas into abstract representations that capture essential landscape features, such as spatial and geographic characteristics. Then, we leverage a comprehensive procedural generation module to synthesize the detailed, structurally consistent 3D landscapes based on these inferred representations. LandCraft can effectively generate production-ready 3D scene assets that can be seamlessly exported to external game engines or modeling software, enabling immediate practical use.

LandCraft: Designing the Structured 3D Landscapes via Text Guidance

Video-based multimodal large language models (V-MLLMs) have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in video-text multimodal tasks.
However, the transferability of adversarial videos to unseen models—a common and practical real-world scenario—remains unexplored. 
In this paper, we pioneer an investigation into the transferability of adversarial video samples across V-MLLMs.
We find that existing adversarial attack methods face significant limitations when applied in black-box settings for V-MLLMs, which we attribute to the following shortcomings: (1) lacking generalization in perturbing video features, (2) focusing only on sparse key-frames, and (3) failing to integrate multimodal information.
To address these limitations and deepen the understanding of V-MLLM vulnerabilities in black-box scenarios, we introduce the Image-to-Video MLLM (I2V-MLLM) attack.
In I2V-MLLM, we utilize an image-based multimodal large language model (I-MLLM) as a surrogate model to craft adversarial video samples.
Multimodal interactions and spatiotemporal information are integrated to disrupt video representations within the latent space, improving adversarial transferability.
Additionally, a perturbation propagation technique is introduced to handle different unknown frame sampling strategies.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate adversarial examples that exhibit strong transferability across different V-MLLMs on multiple video-text multimodal tasks. Compared to white-box attacks on these models, our black-box attacks (using BLIP-2 as a surrogate model) achieve competitive performance, with average attack success rate (AASR) of 57.98% on MSVD-QA and 58.26% on MSRVTT-QA for Zero-Shot VideoQA tasks, respectively.

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