Singapore

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in federated settings enables privacy-preserving adaptation but suffers from cross-client interference due to model aggregation. Existing federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, primarily based on FedAvg, struggle with data heterogeneity, leading to harmful cross-client interference and suboptimal personalization. In this work, we propose \textbf{FedALT}, a novel personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning algorithm that fundamentally departs from FedAvg. Instead of using an aggregated model to initialize local training, each client continues training its individual LoRA while incorporating shared knowledge through a separate Rest-of-World (RoW) LoRA component. To effectively balance local adaptation and global information, FedALT introduces an adaptive mixer that dynamically learns input-specific weightings between the individual and RoW LoRA components, drawing conceptual foundations from the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm. Through extensive experiments on NLP benchmarks, we demonstrate that FedALT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, achieving superior local adaptation without sacrificing computational efficiency.

AAAI 2026

FedALT: Federated Fine-Tuning Through Adaptive Local Training with Rest-of-World LoRA

ml: mixture of experts (moe)

ml: deep neural architectures and foundation models

ml: distributed machine learning & federated learning

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

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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.

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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.

Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are very vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Many defense methods have been proposed to address this issue. However, traditional poisoning attacks are not as threatening as commonly believed. This is because they often cause differences in how the model performs on the training set compared to the validation set. Such inconsistency can alert defenders that their data has been poisoned, allowing them to take the necessary defensive actions. In this paper, we introduce a more threatening type of poisoning attack called the Deferred Poisoning Attack. This new attack allows the model to function normally during the training and validation phases but makes it very sensitive to evasion attacks or even natural noise. We achieve this by ensuring the poisoned model's loss function has a similar value as a normally trained model at each input sample but with a large local curvature. A similar model loss ensures that there is no obvious inconsistency between the training and validation accuracy, demonstrating high stealthiness. On the other hand, the large curvature implies that a small perturbation may cause a significant increase in model loss, leading to substantial performance degradation, which reflects a worse robustness. We fulfill this purpose by making the model have singular Hessian information at the optimal point via our proposed Singularization Regularization term. We have conducted both theoretical and empirical analyses of the proposed method and validated its effectiveness through experiments on image classification tasks. Furthermore, we have confirmed the hazards of this form of poisoning attack under more general scenarios using natural noise, offering a new perspective for research in the field of security.

Deferred Poisoning: Making the Model More Vulnerable via Hessian Singularization

Time series forecasting relies on predicting future values from historical data, yet most state-of-the-art approaches—including transformer and multilayer perceptron-based models—optimize using Mean Squared Error (MSE), which has two fundamental weaknesses: its point-wise error computation fails to capture temporal relationships, and it does not account for inherent noise in the data. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Residual-Informed Loss (RI-Loss), a novel objective function based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). RI-Loss explicitly models noise structure by enforcing dependence between the residual sequence and a random time series, enabling more robust, noise-aware representations. Theoretically, we derive the first non-asymptotic HSIC bound with explicit double-sample complexity terms, achieving optimal convergence rates through Bernstein-type concentration inequalities and Rademacher complexity analysis. This provides rigorous guarantees for RI-Loss optimization while precisely quantifying kernel space interactions. Empirically, experiments across eight real-world benchmarks and five leading forecasting models demonstrate improvements in predictive performance, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Code will be made publicly available to ensure reproducibility.

RI-Loss: A Learnable Residual-Informed Loss for Time Series Forecasting

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) often relies on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which requires human annotations to construct preference datasets. Given the challenge of assigning overall quality scores to data, recent works increasingly adopt fine-grained ratings based on multiple safety rules. In this paper, we discover a robust phenomenon: Rules with higher rating entropy tend to have lower accuracy in distinguishing human-preferred responses. Exploiting this insight, we propose ENCORE, a simple entropy-guided method to compose multi-head rewards by penalizing rules with high rating entropy. Theoretically, we show that such rules yield negligible weights under the Bradley–Terry loss during weight optimization, naturally justifying their penalization. Empirically, ENCORE consistently outperforms strong baselines, including random and uniform weighting, single-head Bradley–Terry, and LLM-as-a-judge, etc. on RewardBench safety tasks. Our method is completely training-free, generally applicable across datasets, and retains interpretability, making it a practical and effective approach for multi-attribute reward modeling.

ENCORE: Entropy-guided Reward Composition for Multi-head Safety Reward Models

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have revolutionized signal processing and computer vision by modeling signals as continuous, differentiable functions parameterized by neural networks. However, INRs are prone to the spectral bias problem, limiting their ability to retain high-frequency information, and often struggle with noise robustness. Motivated by recent trends in iterative refinement processes, we propose Iterative Implicit Neural Representations (I-INRs), a novel plug-and-play framework that iteratively refines signal reconstructions to restore high-frequency details, improve noise robustness, and enhance generalization, ultimately delivering superior reconstruction quality. I-INRs integrate seamlessly into existing INR architectures with only a 0.5–2\% increase in parameters. During reconstruction, the iterative refinement adds just 0.8–1.6\% additional FLOPs over the baseline while delivering a substantial performance boost of up to +2.0 PSNR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that I-INRs consistently outperform WIRE, SIREN, and Gauss across diverse computer-vision tasks, including image fitting, image denoising, and object-occupancy prediction.

I-INR: Iterative Implicit Neural Representations

Stochastic dynamical systems have emerged as fundamental models across numerous application domains, providing powerful mathematical representations for capturing uncertain system behavior. In this paper, we address the problem of runtime safety and reach-avoid probability prediction for discrete-time stochastic systems with online observations, i.e., estimating the probability that the system satisfies a given safety or reach-avoid specification. Unlike traditional approaches that rely solely on offline models, we propose a framework that incorporates real-time observations to dynamically refine probability estimates for safety and reach-avoid events. By introducing observation-aware barrier functions, our method adaptively updates probability bounds as new observations are collected, combining efficient offline computation with online backward iteration. This approach enables rigorous and responsive prediction of safety and reach-avoid probabilities under uncertainty. In addition to the theoretical guarantees, experimental results on benchmark systems demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method.

Runtime Safety and Reach-avoid Prediction of Stochastic Systems via Observation-aware Barrier Functions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in complex reasoning problems. Their effectiveness highly depends on the specific nature of the task, especially the required domain knowledge. Existing approaches, such as mixture-of-experts, typically operate at the task level; they are too coarse to effectively solve the heterogeneous problems involving multiple subjects. This work proposes a novel framework that performs fine-grained analysis at subject level equipped with a designated multi-agent collaboration strategy for addressing heterogeneous problem reasoning. Specifically, given an input query, we first employ a Graph Neural Network to identify the relevant subjects and infer their interdependencies to generate an Subject-based Directed Acyclic Graph (S-DAG), where nodes represent subjects and edges encode information flow. Then we profile the LLM models by assigning each model a subject-specific expertise score, and select the top-performing one for matching corresponding subject of the S-DAG. Such subject-model matching enables graph-structured multi-agent collaboration where information flows from the starting model to the ending model over S-DAG. We curate and release multi-subject subsets of standard benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, MedMCQA) to better reflect complex, real-world reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms existing task-level model selection and multi-agent collaboration baselines in accuracy and efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of subject-aware reasoning and structured collaboration in addressing complex and multi-subject problems.

S-DAG: A Subject-Based Directed Acyclic Graph for Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Reasoning

Dynamic LiDAR point cloud compression (LPCC) is crucial for the efficient transmission and storage of large-scale three-dimensional data in applications such as autonomous driving. However, many existing methods, which primarily focus on compressing geometric or motion information, face a fundamental limitation: they treat all points as equally important. This approach neglects the semantic priorities of a scene, resulting in inefficient bit allocation and particularly compromising the reconstruction quality of safety-critical regions, such as pedestrians and vehicles, which are vital to downstream perception tasks. To address these limitations, we propose R²D-LPCC, a relevance-ranking framework for region-adaptive LPCC that prioritizes fidelity in semantically important regions. Central to our approach is the Adaptive Relevance Learning (ARL) module, which integrates semantic context with uncertainty to evaluate regional significance and guide compression. We also introduce a Multi-scale Region-Adaptive Transform (MRAT) module to enhance semantic feature modeling and preserve fine-grained details in key areas. Additionally, we develop an adaptive multimodal motion estimation module to improve motion prediction in complex three-dimensional environments. Extensive experiments conducted on the SemanticKITTI benchmark demonstrate that R²D-LPCC significantly surpasses ten recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 45.48$\%$ BD-rate gain over the previous leading method, Unicorn, and a 98.58$\%$ gain over the GPCC standard, while ensuring superior reconstruction quality in semantically important regions.

R²D-LPCC: Relevance-Ranking Guided Region-Adaptive Dynamic LiDAR Point Cloud Compression

Solving energy-saving distributed heterogeneous flexible job shop scheduling problem (ES-DHFJSP) aims to enhance industrial production efficiency while minimizing energy consumption. State-of-the-art co-evolutionary algorithms have emerged as effective approaches for addressing ES-DHFJSP. However, existing methodologies demonstrate compromised convergence rates and excessive computational overhead when confronted with vast search spaces. In this work, we propose a novel solution space transformation-guided co-evolution algorithm (SSTCE) to overcome this limitation. In SSTCE, we first establish an inter-job similarity metric and incorporate constrained hierarchical clustering with optimal leaf ordering (CHC-OLO) to generate clustered job sets, which are subsequently utilized for population initialization that achieves a favorable balance between convergence and diversity. To enhance search capability in expansive solution spaces, we devise a dynamic solution space transformation mechanism that effectively reduces inefficient searches within the algorithm. Furthermore, we develop tailored local search strategies leveraging domain-specific knowledge of DHFJSP properties. Extensive experimental evaluations across 20 benchmark instances demonstrate that SSTCE significantly outperforms existing evolutionary algorithms in solving ES-DHFJSP.

A Solution Space Transformation-Guided Co-Evolution for Energy-Saving Distributed Heterogeneous Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Recently, video-language models (VidLMs) have gained widespread attention and adoption. However, existing works primarily focus on terrestrial scenarios, overlooking the highly demanding application needs of underwater observation. To overcome this gap, we introduce UVLM, an under water observation benchmark which is build through a collaborative approach combining human expertise and AI models. To ensure data quality, we have conducted in-depth considerations from multiple perspectives. First, to address the unique challenges of underwater environments, we selected videos that represent typical underwater challenges including light variations, water turbidity, and diverse viewing angles to construct the dataset. Second, to ensure data diversity, the dataset covers a wide range of frame rates, resolutions, 419 classes of marine animals, and various static plants and terrains. Next, for task diversity, we adopted a structured design where observation targets are categorized into two major classes: biological and environmental. Each category includes content observation and change/action observation, totaling 20 subtask types. Finally, we designed several challenging evaluation metrics to enable quantitative comparison and analysis of different methods. Experiments on two representative VidLMs demonstrate that fine-tuning VidLMs on UVLM significantly improves underwater world understanding while also showing potential for slight improvements on existing in-air VidLM benchmarks, such as VideoMME and Perception text. The dataset and prompt engineering will be released publicly.

UVLM: Benchmarking Video Language Model for Underwater World Understanding

Traditional dialogue retrieval aims to select the most appropriate utterance or image from recent dialogue history. However, they often fail to meet users’ actual needs for revisiting semantically coherent content scattered across long-form conversations. To fill this gap, we define the Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval (FFR) task, requiring models to locate query-relevant fragments, comprising both utterances and images, from multimodal long-form dialogues. As a foundation for FFR, we construct MLDR, the longest-turn multimodal dialogue retrieval dataset to date, averaging 25.45 turns per dialogue, with each naturally spanning three distinct topics. To evaluate generalization in real-world scenarios, we curate and annotate a WeChat-based test set comprising real-world multimodal dialogues with an average of 75.38 turns. Building on these resources, we explore existing generation-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on FFR and observe that they often retrieve incoherent utterance-image fragments. While optimized for generating responses from visual-textual inputs, these models lack explicit supervision to ensure semantic coherence within retrieved fragments. To address this, we propose F$^2$RVLM, a generative retrieval model trained in a two-stage paradigm: (1) supervised fine-tuning to inject fragment-level retrieval knowledge, and (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning with multi-objective rewards to encourage outputs with semantic precision, relevance, and contextual coherence. In addition, to account for difficulty variations arising from differences in intra-fragment element distribution, ranging from locally dense to sparsely scattered, we introduce a difficulty-aware curriculum sampling that ranks training instances by predicted difficulty and gradually incorporates harder examples. This strategy enhances the model’s reasoning ability in long, multi-turn dialogue contexts. Experiments on both in-domain and real-domain sets demonstrate that F$^2$RVLM substantially outperforms popular VLMs, achieving superior retrieval performance.

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