Singapore

Automated evaluation of generative text-to-image models remains a challenging problem. Recent works have proposed using multimodal LLMs to judge the quality of images, but these works offer little insight into how multimodal LLMs make use of concepts relevant to humans, such as image style or composition, to generate their overall assessment. In this work, we study what attributes of an image--specifically aesthetics, lack of artifacts, anatomical accuracy, compositional correctness, object adherence, and style--are important for both LLMs and humans to make judgments on image quality. We first curate a dataset of human preferences using synthetically generated image pairs. We use inter-task correlation between each pair of image quality attributes to understand which attributes are related in making human judgments. Repeating the same analysis with LLMs, we find that the relationships between image quality attributes are much weaker. Finally, we study individual image quality attributes by generating synthetic datasets with a high degree of control for each axis. Humans are able to easily judge the quality of an image with respect to all of the specific image quality attributes (e.g. high vs. low aesthetic image), however we find that some attributes, such as anatomical accuracy, are much more difficult for multimodal LLMs to learn to judge. Taken together, these findings reveal interesting differences between how humans and multimodal LLMs perceive images.

AAAI 2026

What Makes a Good Generated Image? Investigating Human and Multimodal LLM Image Preference Alignment

large multimodal models (lmms)

evaluation and analysis

visual reasoning & symbolic representations

multimodal learning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

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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.

Cognitive impairment is becoming a major public health challenge. Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is an effective intervention for cognitive impairment, but traditional methods are difficult to scale, and existing digital systems struggle with group dialogues and cognitive stimulation principles. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, their application in this context faces key challenges: cognitive stimulation dialogue paradigms, a lack of therapeutic reasoning, and static-only user modeling. To address these issues, we propose a principle-driven adaptive policy actualized through a Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue (GCSD) system. We first construct a dataset with over 500 hours of real-world CST conversations and 10,000+ simulated dialogues generated via our Principle-Guided Scenario Simulation strategy. Our GCSD system then integrates four core modules to overcome LLM limitations: (i) a multi-speaker context controller to resolve role confusion; (ii) dynamic participant cognitive state modeling for personalized interaction; (iii) a cognitive stimulation-focused attention loss to instill cognitive stimulation reasoning; and (iv) a multi-dimensional reward strategy to enhance response value. Experimental results demonstrate that GCSD significantly outperforms baseline models across various evaluation metrics. Future work will focus on long-term clinical validation to bridge the gap between computational performance and clinical efficacy.

A Principle-Driven Adaptive Policy for Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue for Elderly with Cognitive Impairment

Diffusion models deliver state-of-the-art generative performance across diverse modalities but remain computationally expensive due to their inherently iterative sampling process. Existing training-free acceleration methods typically improve numerical solvers for the reverse-time ODE, yet their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by the inefficiency of the underlying sampling trajectories.
We propose A-FloPS (Adaptive Flow Path Sampler), a principled, training-free framework that reparameterizes the sampling trajectory of any pre-trained diffusion model into a flow-matching form and augments it with an adaptive velocity decomposition. The reparameterization analytically maps diffusion scores to flow-compatible velocities, yielding integration-friendly trajectories without retraining. The adaptive mechanism further factorizes the velocity field into a linear drift term and a residual component whose temporal variation is actively suppressed, restoring the accuracy benefits of high-order integration even in extremely low-NFE regimes.
Extensive experiments on conditional image generation and text-to-image synthesis show that A-FloPS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free samplers in both sample quality and efficiency. Notably, with as few as $5$ function evaluations, A-FloPS achieves substantially lower FID and generates sharper, more coherent images. The adaptive mechanism also improves native flow-based generative models, underscoring its generality. These results position A-FloPS as a versatile and effective solution for high-quality, low-latency generative modeling.

A-FloPS: Accelerating Diffusion Models via Adaptive Flow Path Sampler

Inference time latency has remained an open challenge for real world applications of large language models (LLMs). State-of-the-art (SOTA) speculative sampling (SpS) methods for LLMs, like EAGLE-3, use tree-based drafting to explore multiple candidate continuations in parallel. However, the hyperparameters controlling the tree structure are static, which limits flexibility and efficiency across diverse contexts and domains.
We introduce \textbf{Re}inforcement learning for \textbf{Sp}eculative \textbf{S}ampling (\textbf{Re-SpS}), the first reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for draft tree hyperparameter optimization. Re-SpS dynamically adjusts draft tree hyperparameters in real-time, learning context-aware policies that maximize generation speed by balancing speculative aggression with computational overhead. 
It leverages efficient state representations from target model hidden states and introduces multi-step action persistence for better context modeling.
Evaluation results across five diverse benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the SOTA method EAGLE-3,
achieving up to 5.45$\times$ speedup over the backbone LLM and up to 1.12$\times$ speedup compared to EAGLE-3 across five diverse benchmarks, with no loss in output fidelity. Our code is included in the supplementary material and will be released upon paper acceptance.

Re-SpS: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Speculative Sampling

Equilibria of realistic multiplayer games constitute a key solution concept both in practical applications, such as online advertising auctions and electricity markets, and in analytical frameworks used to study strategic voting in elections or assess policy impacts in integrated assessment models. However, efficiently computing these equilibria requires games to have a carefully designed structure and satisfy numerous restrictions; otherwise, the computational complexity becomes prohibitive. In particular, finding even approximate Nash equilibria in general normal-form games with three or more players is known to be PPAD-complete. Current state-of-the-art algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in multiplayer normal-form games either suffer from poor scalability due to their reliance on non-convex optimization solvers, or lack guarantees of convergence to a true equilibrium. In this paper, we propose a novel reformulation of the Nash equilibrium computation problem and develop a complete and sound spatial branch-and-bound algorithm based on this reformulation. We provide a qualitative analysis arguing why one should expect our approach to perform better than conventional formulation, and show the relationship between approximate solution to our reformulation and that of computing an approximate Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our algorithm substantially outperforms existing complete methods.

Spatial Branch-and-Bound for Computing Multiplayer Nash Equilibrium

Stochastic approximation is a powerful class of algorithms with celebrated successes. A large body of previous analysis, however, focuses on stochastic approximations driven by contractive operators, which is not applicable in some important reinforcement learning settings like the average reward setting. This work instead investigates stochastic approximations with merely nonexpansive operators. In particular, we study nonexpansive stochastic approximations with Markovian noise, providing both asymptotic and finite sample analysis.
Key to our analysis are a few novel bounds of noise terms resulting from the Poisson equation. As an application, we prove, for the first time, that the classical tabular average reward temporal difference learning converges to a sample path dependent fixed point.

Asymptotic and Finite Sample Analysis of Nonexpansive Stochastic Approximations with Markovian Noise

Time series forecasting is essential across diverse domains including traffic management, industrial control, and economic analysis. While MLP-based methods have gained attention for achieving Transformer-comparable performance with fewer parameters and better robustness, they face critical limitations including loss of weak seasonal signals, capacity constraints in weight-sharing MLPs, and insufficient channel fusion in channel-independent strategies. To address these challenges, we propose MDMLP-EIA (Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention) with three key innovations. First, we develop an adaptive fused dual-domain seasonal MLP that categorizes seasonal signals into strong and weak components. It employs an adaptive zero-initialized channel fusion strategy to minimize noise interference while effectively integrating predictions. Second, we introduce an energy invariant attention mechanism that adaptively focuses on different feature channels within trend and seasonal predictions across time steps. This mechanism maintains constant total signal energy to align with the decomposition-prediction-reconstruction framework and enhance robustness against disturbances. Third, we propose a dynamic capacity adjustment mechanism for channel-independent MLPs. This mechanism scales neuron count with the square root of channel count, ensuring sufficient capacity as channels increase. Extensive experiments across nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that MDMLP-EIA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. Our code will be made available online.

MDMLP-EIA: Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention for Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code is available at: https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time

T3Time: Tri-Modal Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Multi-Head Alignment and Residual Fusion

Flow matching casts sample generation as learning a continuous-time velocity field that transports noise to data. Existing flow matching networks typically predict each point's velocity independently, considering only its location and time along its flow trajectory, and ignoring neighboring points. However, this pointwise approach may overlook correlations between points along the generation trajectory that could enhance velocity predictions, thereby improving downstream generation quality. To address this, we propose Graph Flow Matching (GFM), a lightweight enhancement that decomposes the learned velocity into a reaction term---any standard flow matching network---and a diffusion term that aggregates neighbor information via a graph neural module. This reaction--diffusion formulation retains the scalability of deep flow models while enriching velocity predictions with local context, all at minimal additional computational cost. Operating in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder, GFM consistently improves Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and recall across five image generation benchmarks (LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, FFHQ, AFHQ-Cat, and CelebA-HQ at $256\times256$), demonstrating its effectiveness as a modular enhancement to existing flow matching architectures.

Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fields

Foundation segmentation models, such as SAM and its video-oriented variant SAM2, have achieved remarkable success in natural image and video segmentation. However, their direct application to echocardiography video is challenged by structural uncertainty arising from severe speckle noise and blurry anatomical boundaries. To address this, we propose E³SAM2, a lightweight adaptation framework that introduces a novel entropy-based methodology to explicitly model and mitigate such uncertainty. Specifically, an entropy-guided attention mechanism is introduced to steer the model’s focus toward structurally reliable features, particularly in speckle-dominated regions. Additionally, an entropy regularization loss is introduced to further enhance target-background discrimination. To better resolve indistinct anatomical contours, an edge-aware supervision module is incorporated to inject explicit boundary priors for sharper delineation. These components are efficiently integrated through a global-local feature adapter. Experiments on CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic datasets demonstrate that E³SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art segmentation and clinical estimation performance, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

E³SAM2: Entropy-Aware and Edge-Guided Adaptation of SAM2 for Echocardiography Video Segmentation

Accident anticipation is essential for proactive and safe autonomous driving, where even a brief advance warning can enable critical evasive actions. However, two key challenges hinder real-world deployment: (1) noisy or degraded sensory inputs from weather, motion blur, or hardware limitations, and (2) the need to issue timely yet reliable predictions that balance early alerts with false-alarm suppression. We propose a unified framework that integrates diffusion-based denoising with a time-aware actor-critic model to address these challenges. The diffusion module reconstructs noise-resilient image and object features through iterative refinement, preserving critical motion and interaction cues under sensor degradation. In parallel, the actor-critic architecture leverages long-horizon temporal reasoning and time-weighted rewards to determine the optimal moment to raise an alert, aligning early detection with reliability. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (DAD, CCD, A3D) demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and significant gains in mean time-to-accident, while maintaining robust performance under Gaussian and impulse noise. Qualitative analyses further show that our model produces earlier, more stable, and human-aligned predictions in both routine and highly complex traffic scenarios, highlighting its potential for real-world, safety-critical deployment.

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