Singapore

Efficiently and accurately determining the symmetry is a crucial step in the structural analysis of crystalline materials. Existing methods usually mindlessly apply deep learning models while ignoring the underlying chemical rules. More importantly, experiments show that they face a serious sub-property confusion SPC problem. To address the above challenges, from a decoupled perspective, we introduce the XRDecoupler framework, a problem-solving arsenal specifically designed to tackle the SPC problem. Imitating the thinking process of chemists, we innovatively incorporate multidimensional crystal symmetry information as superclass guidance to ensure that the model&#39;s prediction process aligns with chemical intuition. We further design a hierarchical PXRD pattern learning model and a multi-objective optimization approach to achieve high-quality representation and balanced optimization. Comprehensive evaluations on three mainstream databases (e.g., CCDC, CoREMOF, and InorganicData) demonstrate that XRDecoupler excels in performance, interpretability, and generalization. The code for our method is available in Supplement.

AAAI 2026

Rethinking Crystal Symmetry Prediction: A Decoupled Perspective

space group

crystal material

x-ray diffraction

deep learning

## 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.

Efficiently and accurately determining the symmetry is a crucial step in the structural analysis of crystalline materials. Existing methods usually mindlessly apply deep learning models while ignoring the underlying chemical rules. More importantly, experiments show that they face a serious sub-property confusion SPC problem. To address the above challenges, from a decoupled perspective, we introduce the XRDecoupler framework, a problem-solving arsenal specifically designed to tackle the SPC problem. Imitating the thinking process of chemists, we innovatively incorporate multidimensional crystal symmetry information as superclass guidance to ensure that the model's prediction process aligns with chemical intuition. We further design a hierarchical PXRD pattern learning model and a multi-objective optimization approach to achieve high-quality representation and balanced optimization. Comprehensive evaluations on three mainstream databases (e.g., CCDC, CoREMOF, and InorganicData) demonstrate that XRDecoupler excels in performance, interpretability, and generalization. The code for our method is available in Supplement.

technical paper

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.

Object 6D pose estimation is a challenging task that is crucial for robotics and augmented reality applications, particularly when dealing with novel objects. A promising direction is single-reference-based estimation, which requires only a single annotated view instead of a full 3D model. However, existing methods rely on dense correspondence regression, which suffers from limited global consistency due to the local nature of convolutional architectures, and faces challenges in symmetric or occluded scenarios due to deterministic predictions.
We present CoordAR, a novel autoregressive framework for single-reference 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. CoordAR formulates 3D-3D correspondences between the reference and query views as a discretized coordinate map, which is decoded autoregressively in a probabilistic manner. To enable accurate correspondence regression, CoordAR introduces: 1) a novel coordinate map tokenization enabling probabilistic prediction over discretized 3D space; 2) a decoupled encoding strategy that separately encodes RGB appearance and coordinate cues; and 3) an autoregressive transformer decoder conditioned on both pixel-aligned query features and the partially generated coordinate sequence.
Thanks to the novel designs, CoordAR significantly outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness to symmetry, occlusion, and other challenges in real-world tests, while requiring only a single reference view.

CoordAR: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Autoregressive Coordinate Map Generation

Modular design of planning-oriented autonomous driving has markedly advanced end-to-end systems. However, existing architectures remain constrained by an over-reliance on ego status, hindering generalization and robust scene understanding. We identify the root cause as an inherent design within these architectures that allows ego status to be easily leveraged as a shortcut. Specifically, the premature fusion of ego status in the upstream BEV encoder allows an information flow from this strong prior to dominate the downstream planning module. To address this challenge, we propose AdaptiveAD, an architectural-level solution based on a multi-context fusion strategy. Its core is a dual-branch structure that explicitly decouples scene perception and ego status. One branch performs scene-driven reasoning based on multi-task learning, but with ego status deliberately omitted from the BEV encoder, while the other conducts ego-driven reasoning based solely on the planning task. A scene-aware fusion module then adaptively integrates the complementary decisions from the two branches to form the final planning trajectory. To ensure this decoupling does not compromise multi-task learning, we introduce a path attention mechanism for ego-BEV interaction and add two targeted auxiliary tasks: BEV unidirectional distillation and autoregressive online mapping. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that AdaptiveAD achieves state-of-the-art open-loop planning performance. Crucially, it significantly mitigates the over-reliance on ego status and exhibits impressive generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios. We will release the source code upon paper acceptance.

Decoupling Scene Perception and Ego Status: A Multi-Context Fusion Approach for Enhanced Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

We consider the problem of modifying a description logic concept in light of models represented as pointed interpretations. We call this setting model change, and distinguish three main kinds of changes: eviction, which consists of only removing models; reception, which incorporates models; and revision, which combines removal with incorporation of models in a single operation. We introduce a formal notion of revision and argue that it does not reduce to a simple combination of eviction and reception, contrary to intuition. We provide positive and negative results on the compatibility of eviction and reception for EL-bottom and ALC description logic concepts and on
the compatibility of revision for ALC concepts.

Model Change for Description Logic Concepts

The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of $O(H \cdot N^2)$ that grows quadratically with the context size ($N$) and linearly with the number of heads ($H$). This standard implementation harbors significant computational redundancy, as all heads independently compute attention over the same sequence space. Existing sparse methods, meanwhile, often trade information integrity for computational efficiency. To resolve this efficiency-performance trade-off, we propose SPAttention, whose core contribution is the introduction of a new paradigm we term Principled Structural Sparsity. SPAttention does not merely drop connections but instead reorganizes the computational task by partitioning the total attention workload into balanced, non-overlapping distance bands, assigning each head a unique segment. This approach transforms the multi-head attention mechanism from $H$ independent $O(N^2)$ computations into a single, collaborative $O(N^2)$ computation, fundamentally reducing complexity by a factor of $H$. The structured inductive bias compels functional specialization among heads, enabling a more efficient allocation of computational resources from redundant modeling to distinct dependencies across the entire sequence span. Extensive empirical validation on the OLMoE-1B-7B and 0.25B-1.75B model series demonstrates that while delivering an approximately two-fold increase in training throughput, its performance is on par with standard dense attention, even surpassing it on select key metrics, while consistently outperforming representative sparse attention methods including Longformer, Reformer, and BigBird across all evaluation metrics. Our work demonstrates that thoughtfully designed structural sparsity can serve as an effective inductive bias that simultaneously improves both computational efficiency and model performance, opening a new avenue for the architectural design of next-generation, high-performance LLMs.

Making Every Head Count: Sparse Attention Without the Speed-Performance Trade-off

Multilingual Alignment is an effective and representative paradigm to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities, which transfers the capabilities from the high-resource languages to the low-resource languages. Meanwhile, some research on language-specific neurons provides a new perspective to analyze and understand LLMs' mechanisms. However, we find that there are many neurons that are shared by multiple but not all languages and cannot be correctly classified. In this work, we propose a ternary classification methodology that categorizes neurons into three types, including language-specific neurons, language-related neurons, and language-agnostic neurons. And we propose a corresponding identification algorithm to distinguish these different types of neurons. Furthermore, based on the distributional characteristics of different types of neurons, we divide the LLMs' internal process for multilingual inference into four parts: (1) multilingual understanding, (2) shared semantic space reasoning, (3) multilingual output space transformation, and (4) vocabulary space outputting. Additionally, we systematically analyze the models before and after alignment with a focus on different types of neurons. We also analyze the phenomenon of ''Spontaneous Multilingual Alignment''. Overall, our work conducts a comprehensive investigation based on different types of neurons, providing empirical results and valuable insights to better understand multilingual alignment and multilingual capabilities of LLMs.

How Does Alignment Enhance LLMs’ Multilingual Capabilities? A Language Neurons Perspective

Value decomposition is a central approach in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), enabling centralized training with decentralized execution by factorizing the global value function into local values. To ensure individual-global-max (IGM) consistency, existing methods either enforce monotonicity constraints, which limit expressive power, or adopt softer surrogates at the cost of algorithmic complexity. In this work, we present a dynamical systems analysis of non-monotonic value decomposition, modeling learning dynamics as continuous-time gradient flow. We prove that, under approximately greedy exploration, all zero-loss equilibria violating IGM consistency are unstable saddle points, while only IGM-consistent solutions are stable attractors of the learning dynamics. Extensive experiments on both synthetic matrix games and challenging MARL benchmarks demonstrate that unconstrained, non-monotonic factorization reliably recovers IGM-optimal solutions and consistently outperforms monotonic baselines. Additionally, we investigate the influence of temporal-difference targets and exploration strategies, providing actionable insights for the design of future value-based MARL algorithms.

Beyond Monotonicity: Revisiting Factorization Principles in Multi-Agent Q-Learning

As AI becomes increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, it is disrupting skills and displacing workers. NSF’s National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE) posits that AI can be part of the solution to the growing problem if we can use AI for reskilling, upskilling, and workforce development at scale. The long-term vision of AI-ALOE is to develop and use AI technologies to enhance the proficiency of online education for all adult learners, using in-person education as a benchmark. The day-to-day mission of AI-ALOE is to conduct responsible research into AI that is grounded in theories of human cognition and learning and derived from the scientific process of learning engineering. I will describe ongoing research at AI-ALOE.

AI for Reskilling, Upskilling, and Workforce Development

Small Data: A New Paradigm for the Next Generation of AI

Current algorithms for steering LLM behavior are often implemented for specific use cases and tasks. To help provide a more general purpose approach to steering model behavior, IBM has recently developed two toolkits: AI Steerability 360 (AISteer360) and In-Context Explainability 360 (ICX360). This hands-on lab will provide a comprehensive walkthrough of these toolkits.

Participants will first be guided through a conceptual overview of how to steer model behavior across four model control surfaces: input, structural, state, and output steering. Through a series of interactive coding sessions, attendees will implement steering methods on a running example focused on steering a model to produce less toxic outputs. The lab will demonstrate how to construct steering controls for fine-grained model intervention, use cases for specific model tasks, and benchmarks for comparing steering methods on a given use case.

Closing the loop, participants will learn how the ICX360 toolkit can be used to understand why a given (steered) model produced a given output, and how to use these insights to guide refined controls. The session will build progressively from concept to implementation, ensuring participants understand how to create an end-to-end steering workflow.

Prerequisites: Participants should be comfortable with Python programming and have some prior exposure to LLMs and natural language processing (prompting, fine-tuning, etc.). Experience using the Hugging Face transformers package will be beneficial but not required. Participants must bring their own laptop with a Python IDE installed.

Remote compute access will be facilitated through Hugging Face and Google Colab. All setup instructions and access details will be communicated to enrolled participants in advance via the lab’s website.

Learning to Steer Large Language Models

Agentic AI is poised to redefine intelligent decision-making in Industry 4.0 by enabling autonomous systems to perceive, reason, and act over multimodal data sources such as sensor streams, structured knowledge bases, and unstructured maintenance logs. Despite the rapid progress of large language models and multimodal learning, building deployable and trustworthy agentic systems remains challenging due to fragmented data silos, integration complexity, lack of explainability, and limited evaluation protocols.
This tutorial offers a comprehensive, hands-on walkthrough of the full lifecycle of multimodal agentic AI systems—from inception to productization. Participants will begin by learning foundational agent architectures and reasoning strategies, including Plan-Execute, ReAct, Reflexion, RAFA, and hybrid symbolic-neural approaches. Building on these concepts, the tutorial features two interactive lab sessions: (i) addressing integration challenges in smart manufacturing using an open-source multi-agent environment, and (ii) benchmarking agent performance, reasoning, and explainability in an enterprise-scale industrial simulation.
Along the way, participants will engage with state-of-the-art tools and workflows for data integration, trace alignment, and failure diagnosis. They will explore evaluation techniques that combine human feedback, sensor-grounded truth, and emerging LLM-as-a-judge methods to assess reliability and trustworthiness. Additional emphasis will be placed on governance and monitoring frameworks, as well as visualizations for traceability and introspection, enabling participants to design explainable and auditable deployments.
The tutorial leverages two open-source environments AssetOpsBench, a simulation platform with 141 curated industrial scenarios, and SmartPilot, a smart manufacturing multi-agent system for multimodal data integration and reasoning, providing participants with realistic data and experimental workflows. Together, these environments demonstrate how to evaluate agents under diverse operating conditions, such as anomaly detection, fault progression, and post-maintenance recovery.

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Next from AAAI 2026

CoordAR: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Autoregressive Coordinate Map Generation

Similar lecture

CrystalICL: Enabling In-Context Learning for Crystal Generation