Singapore

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods are crucial for adapting large pre-trained models. Among these, LoRA is considered a foundational approach. Building on this, the influential DoRA method enhances performance by decomposing weight updates into magnitude and direction. However, its underlying mechanism remains unclear, and it introduces significant computational overhead. In this work, we first identify that DoRA&#39;s success stems from its capacity to increase the singular value entropy of the weight update matrix, which promotes a more uniform update distribution akin to full fine-tuning. We then reformulate DoRA into a mathematically equivalent and more efficient matrix form, revealing it as a learnable weight conditioning method. Based on this insight, we propose a unified framework for designing advanced PEFT methods by exploring two orthogonal dimensions: the architectural placement and the transformation type of the conditioning matrix. Within this framework, we introduce two novel methods: (1) \textbf{Pre-Diag}, which applies a diagonal conditioning matrix before the LoRA update to efficiently calibrate the pre-trained weights, thereby enhancing performance while reducing training time; and (2) \textbf{S}kewed \textbf{O}rthogonal \textbf{R}otation \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{SORA}), which employs a parameter-efficient orthogonal rotation to perform a more powerful, norm-preserving transformation of the feature space. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance and efficiency compared to both LoRA and DoRA.

AAAI 2026

Calibrating and Rotating: A Unified Framework for Weight Conditioning in PEFT

nlp: (large) language models

nlp: applications

nlp: generation

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.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods are crucial for adapting large pre-trained models. Among these, LoRA is considered a foundational approach. Building on this, the influential DoRA method enhances performance by decomposing weight updates into magnitude and direction. However, its underlying mechanism remains unclear, and it introduces significant computational overhead. In this work, we first identify that DoRA's success stems from its capacity to increase the singular value entropy of the weight update matrix, which promotes a more uniform update distribution akin to full fine-tuning. We then reformulate DoRA into a mathematically equivalent and more efficient matrix form, revealing it as a learnable weight conditioning method. Based on this insight, we propose a unified framework for designing advanced PEFT methods by exploring two orthogonal dimensions: the architectural placement and the transformation type of the conditioning matrix. Within this framework, we introduce two novel methods: (1) \textbf{Pre-Diag}, which applies a diagonal conditioning matrix before the LoRA update to efficiently calibrate the pre-trained weights, thereby enhancing performance while reducing training time; and (2) \textbf{S}kewed \textbf{O}rthogonal \textbf{R}otation \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{SORA}), which employs a parameter-efficient orthogonal rotation to perform a more powerful, norm-preserving transformation of the feature space. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance and efficiency compared to both LoRA and DoRA.

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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**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

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.

Super-resolution from a Blurry low-resolution image (SRB) constitutes a severely ill-posed inverse problem. Current learning-based SRB approaches primarily rely on synthetic, well-labeled paired datasets to regularize solution spaces, yet they exhibit limited generalizability in practical applications due to significant domain discrepancies between simulated degradations and real-world imaging conditions. To bridge this synthetic-to-real gap, we propose a novel {\it S}elf-supervised {\it E}vent-based SRB (SE-SRB) framework that leverages neuromorphic event streams as physical priors and adopts a lightweight neural architecture tailored for effective domain adaptation. Specifically, the proposed SE-SRB introduces a self-supervised learning paradigm based on asymmetric integral driven consistency, which enforces temporal coherence between predictions derived from RGB and asynchronous event streams at different time points. This constraint encourages the model to implicitly learn the fusion of complementary modalities and reconstruct sharp high-resolution images in accordance with underlying physics patterns. Extensive experiments validate that SE-SRB consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Notably, all modules are implemented using lightweight neural architectures and are jointly optimized, resulting in high computational efficiency with fewer parameters, reduced FLOPs, and real-time inference capability (40 FPS).

Event-Guided Super-Resolving Blurry Image via Asymmetric Integral Driven Consistency

Audio comprehension—including speech, non-speech sounds, and music—is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly ``from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 57.33\% and 45.9\% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence.

MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence

3D Gaussian Splatting-based geometry reconstruction is regarded as an excellent paradigm due to its favorable trade-off between speed and reconstruction quality. However, such 3D Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines often face challenges when reconstructing semi-transparent surfaces, hindering their broader application in real-world scenes. The primary reason is the assumption in mainstream methods that each pixel corresponds to one specific depth—an assumption that fails under semi-transparent conditions where multiple surfaces are visible, leading to depth ambiguity and ineffective recovery of geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose TSPE-GS (Transparent Surface Probabilistic Extraction for Gaussian Splatting), a novel probabilistic depth extraction approach that uniformly samples transmittance to model the multi-modal distribution of opacity and depth per pixel, replacing the previous single-peak distribution that caused depth confusion across surfaces. By progressively fusing truncated signed distance functions, TSPE-GS separately reconstructs distinct external and internal surfaces in a unified framework. Our method can be easily generalized to other Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines, effectively extracting semi-transparent surfaces without requiring additional training overhead. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected semi-transparent datasets, as well as opaque object datasets, demonstrate that TSPE-GS significantly enhances reconstruction accuracy for semi-transparent surfaces while maintaining reconstruction quality in opaque scenes.

TSPE-GS: Probabilistic Depth Extraction for Semi-Transparent Surface Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Although neural networks achieve promising performance in many tasks, they may still fail when encountering some examples and bring about risks to applications. To discover risky samples, previous literature attempts to search for patterns of risky samples within existing datasets or inject perturbation into them. Yet in this way the diversity of risky samples is limited by the coverage of existing datasets. To overcome this limitation, recent works adopt diffusion models to produce new risky samples beyond the coverage of existing datasets. However, these methods struggle in the conformity between generated samples and expected categories, which could introduce label noise and severely limit their effectiveness in applications. To address this issue, we propose RiskyDiff that incorporates the embeddings of both texts and images as implicit constraints of category conformity. We also design a conformity score to further explicitly strengthen the category conformity, as well as introduce the mechanisms of embedding screening and risky gradient guidance to boost the risk of generated samples. Extensive experiments reveal that RiskyDiff~greatly outperforms existing methods in terms of the degree of risk, generation quality, and conformity with conditioned categories. We also empirically show the generalization ability of the models can be enhanced by augmenting training data with generated samples of high conformity.

Generating Risky Samples with Conformity Constraints via Diffusion Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in single-agent vision tasks, yet benchmarks for evaluating multi-agent collaborative perception remain scarce. This gap is critical, as multi-drone systems provide enhanced coverage, robustness, and collaboration compared to single-sensor setups. Existing multi-image benchmarks mainly target basic perception tasks using high-quality single-agent images, thus failing to evaluate MLLMs in more complex, egocentric collaborative scenarios, especially under real-world degraded perception conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce AirCopBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs in embodied aerial collaborative perception under challenging perceptual conditions. AirCopBench includes 14.6k+ questions derived from both simulator and real-world data, spanning four key task dimensions: Scene Understanding, Object Understanding, Perception Assessment, and Collaborative Decision, across 14 task types. We construct the benchmark using data from challenging degraded-perception scenarios with annotated collaborative events, generating large-scale questions through model-, rule-, and human-based methods under rigorous quality control. Evaluations on 40 MLLMs show significant performance gaps in collaborative perception tasks, with the best model trailing humans by 24.38% on average and exhibiting inconsistent results across tasks. Fine-tuning experiments further confirm the feasibility of sim-to-real transfer in aerial collaborative perception.

AirCopBench: A Benchmark for Multi-drone Collaborative Embodied Perception and Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) empowered by chain-of-thought reasoning have achieved impressive accuracy on complex tasks but suffer from excessive inference costs and latency when applied uniformly to all problems. We propose SABER (Switchable and Balanced Training for Efficient LLM Reasoning), a reinforcement learning framework that endows LLMs with user‑controllable, token‑budgeted reasoning. SABER first profiles each training example’s base‑model thinking token usage and assigns it to one of the predefined budget tiers. During fine‑tuning, the model is guided by system prompts and length‑aware rewards to respect its assigned budget. In parallel, we incorporate no‑think examples to ensure the model remains reliable even when explicit reasoning is turned off. SABER further supports four discrete inference modes—NoThink, FastThink, CoreThink, and DeepThink, enabling flexible trade‑offs between latency and reasoning depth. Extensive evaluations on math reasoning (MATH, GSM8K), code generation (MBPP), and logical reasoning (LiveBench-Reasoning) demonstrate that SABER achieves high accuracy under tight budgets, graceful degradation, and effective cross-scale and cross‑domain generalization. In particular, SABER‑FastThink cuts reasoning length by 65.4% and yields a 3.6% accuracy gain compared with the base model on the MATH benchmark.

SABER: Switchable and Balanced Training for Efficient LLM Reasoning

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising approach for 3D reconstruction, providing explicit, point-based representations and enabling high-quality real-time rendering. However, when trained with sparse input views, 3DGS suffers from overfitting and structural degradation, leading to poor generalization on novel views. This limitation arises from its optimization relying solely on photometric loss without incorporating any 3D structure priors. To address this issue, we propose Coherent supergaussian Modeling with Spatial Priors (COSMOS). Inspired by the concept of superpoints from 3D segmentation, COSMOS introduces 3D structure priors by newly defining supergaussian groupings of Gaussians based on local geometric cues and appearance features. To this end, COSMOS applies inter-group global self-attention across supergaussian groups and sparse local attention among individual Gaussians, enabling the integration of global and local spatial information. These structure-aware features are then used for predicting Gaussian attributes, facilitating more consistent 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, by leveraging supergaussian-based grouping, COSMOS enforces an intra-group positional regularization to maintain structural coherence and suppress floaters, thereby enhancing training stability under sparse-view conditions. Our experiments on Blender and DTU show that COSMOS surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods in sparse‑view settings without any external depth supervision.

COSMOS: Coherent SuperGaussian Modeling with Spatial Priors for Sparse-View 3D Splatting

Effective clinical history taking is a foundational yet underexplored component of clinical reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on static benchmarks, they often fall short in dynamic, multi-turn diagnostic settings that require iterative questioning and hypothesis refinement. To address this gap, we propose Note2Chat, a note-driven framework that trains LLMs to conduct structured history taking and diagnosis by learning from widely available medical notes. Instead of relying on scarce and sensitive dialogue data, we convert real-world medical notes into high-quality doctor-patient dialogues using a decision tree-guided generation and refinement pipeline. We then propose a three-stage fine-tuning strategy combining supervised learning, simulated data augmentation, and preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-turn reasoning paradigm that reframes history taking as a sequence of single-turn reasoning problems. This design enhances interpretability and enables local supervision, dynamic adaptation, and greater sample efficiency. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves clinical reasoning, achieving gains of +16.9 F1 and +21.0 Top-1 diagnostic accuracy over GPT-4o.

Note2Chat: Improving LLMs for Multi-Turn Clinical History Taking Using Medical Notes

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a well-known challenge due to deep models often producing overconfident. In this paper, we reveal a key insight that trained classifiers tend to rely on sparse parameter contribution patterns, meaning that only a few dominant parameters drive predictions. This brittleness can be exploited by OOD inputs that anomalously trigger these parameters, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns (SPCP), which enhances OOD detection robustness by encouraging the classifier to learn boundary-oriented dense contribution patterns. Specifically, SPCP operates during training by rectifying excessively high parameter contributions based on a dynamically estimated threshold. This mechanism promotes the classifier to rely on a broader set of parameters for decision-making, thereby reducing the risk of overconfident predictions caused by anomalously triggered parameters, while preserving in-distribution (ID) performance. Extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups verify the effectiveness of SPCP.

Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Adversarial examples in neural networks have been extensively studied in Euclidean settings, but recent advances in _hyperbolic networks_ call for a reevaluation of attack strategies in non-Euclidean geometries. Existing methods such as FGSM and PGD apply perturbations without regard to the underlying hyperbolic structure, potentially leading to inefficient or geometrically inconsistent attacks.
In this work, we propose a novel adversarial attack that explicitly leverages the geometric properties of hyperbolic space. Specifically, we compute the gradient of the loss function in the tangent space of hyperbolic space, decompose it into a radial (depth) component and an angular (semantic) component, and apply perturbation derived solely from the angular direction.
Our method generates adversarial examples by focusing perturbations in semantically sensitive directions encoded in angular movement within the hyperbolic geometry. Empirical results on image classification, cross-modal retrieval tasks and network architectures demonstrate that our attack achieves higher fooling rates than conventional adversarial attacks, while producing high-impact perturbations with deeper insights into vulnerabilities of hyperbolic embeddings. This work highlights the importance of geometry-aware adversarial strategies in curved representation spaces and provides a principled framework for attacking hierarchical embeddings.

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