Singapore

Training of large-scale models is both computationally intensive and often constrained by the availability of labeled data. Model merging offers a compelling alternative by directly integrating the weights of multiple source models without requiring additional data or extensive training. However, conventional model merging techniques, such as parameter averaging, suffer from unintentional merging of non-generalizable features, especially in non-IID scenarios where source models exhibit significant weight disparities. Alternatively, the model ensembling technique typically provides more stable and superior performance that aggregates multiple models by averaging outputs. However, it incurs higher inference costs and increased storage requirements. Previous studies showed the similarities between model merging and ensembling experimentally, but there is a lack of theoretical evidence and evaluation metrics. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-loss, a novel evaluation metric that quantifies the compatibility of merging source models using only unlabeled data. By measuring the discrepancy between parameter averaging and model ensembling at both layer and node levels, M-loss facilitates more effective merging strategies. Specifically, M-loss serves as a quantitative criterion showing the theoretical feasibility of model merging, and a guide for parameter significance in model pruning strategies. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations demonstrate that incorporating M-loss into the merging process significantly improves the alignment between merged models and model ensembling, offering a scalable and efficient framework for accurate model consolidation.

AAAI 2026

M-Loss: Quantifying Model Merging Compatibility with Limited Unlabeled Data

efficient ai.

model merging

transfer learning

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) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/acl2026

Registration Required

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.

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.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**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.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has demonstrated great promise for learning generalizable graph representations from unlabeled data. However, conventional GCL approaches face two critical limitations: (1) the restricted expressive capacity of multilayer perceptron (MLP) based encoders, and (2) suboptimal negative samples that either from random augmentations—failing to provide effective 'hard negatives'—or generated hard negatives without addressing the semantic distinctions crucial for discriminating graph data. To this end, we propose Khan-GCL, a novel framework that integrates the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) into the GCL encoder architecture, substantially enhancing its representational capacity. Furthermore, we exploit the rich information embedded within KAN coefficient parameters to develop two novel critical feature identification techniques that enable the generation of semantically meaningful hard negative samples for each graph representation. These strategically constructed hard negatives guide the encoder to learn more discriminative features by emphasizing critical semantic differences between graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing GCL methods across a variety of datasets and tasks.

Khan-GCL: Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Based Graph Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

Unsupervised industrial anomaly detection requires accurately identifying defects without labeled data. Traditional autoencoder-based methods often struggle with incomplete anomaly suppression and loss of fine details, as their single-pass decoding fails to effectively handle anomalies with varying severity and scale. We propose a recursive architecture for autoencoder (RcAE), which performs reconstruction iteratively to progressively suppress anomalies while refining normal structures. Unlike traditional single-pass models, this recursive design naturally produces a sequence of reconstructions, progressively exposing suppressed abnormal patterns. To leverage this reconstruction dynamics, we introduce a Cross Recursion Detection (CRD) module that tracks inconsistencies across recursion steps, enhancing detection of both subtle and large-scale anomalies. Additionally, we incorporate a Detail Preservation Network (DPN) to recover high-frequency textures typically lost during reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing non-diffusion methods, and achieves performance on par with recent diffusion models with only 10% of their parameters and offering substantially faster inference. These results highlight the practicality and efficiency of our approach for real-world applications.

RcAE: Recursive Reconstruction Framework for Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection

Schrödinger Bridge-based diffusion models have demonstrated promising performance in signal denoising. However, since ground truth signals are unavailable during the sampling process, neural networks must be employed to learn the mapping, which breaks the theoretical coupling between diffusion and sampling processes. This paper reveals a critical inconsistency between the theoretical diffusion path and the learned sampling trajectory across different frequency bands. This diffusion-sampling inconsistency directly undermines denoising effectiveness. To address this limitation, we propose the Frequency-Dependent Scheduled Schrödinger Bridge (FDSSB), which leverages power spectral density to adaptively schedule diffusion processes across frequencies. This mechanism assigns asynchronous diffusion schedules to different frequency components, correcting the diffusion schedule to better match the sampling process. As a result, FDSSB effectively mitigates the mismatch and enhances the consistency between diffusion and sampling processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FDSSB achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio improvement of 7.9066 dB over competitive approaches.

Frequency-Dependent Scheduled Schrödinger Bridge for Underwater Acoustic Signal Denoising

Instruction-following is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing works primarily focus on assessing how well LLMs adhere to user instructions, they often overlook scenarios where instructions contain conflicting constraints—a common occurrence in complex prompts. The behavior of LLMs under such conditions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ConInstruct, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' ability to detect and resolve conflicts within user instructions. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' conflict detection performance and analyze their conflict resolution behavior. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) Proprietary LLMs exhibit strong conflict detection capabilities, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o achieving average F1-scores of 86.6\% and 84.9\%, ranking first and third, respectively. (2) Despite their strong conflict detection abilities, LLMs rarely explicitly notify users about the conflicts or request clarification when faced with conflicting constraints. These results underscore a critical shortcoming in current LLMs and highlight an important area for future improvement when designing instruction-following LLMs.

ConInstruct: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conflict Detection and Resolution in Instructions

We propose a mesh-free policy iteration framework based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. The method iteratively alternates between soft policy evaluation and improvement using automatic differentiation and neural approximation, without relying on spatial discretization. We present a detailed $L^2$ error analysis that decomposes the total approximation error into three sources: iteration error, policy network error, and PDE residual error. The proposed algorithm is validated with a range of challenging control tasks, including high-dimensional linear-quadratic regulation in 5D and 10D, as well as nonlinear systems such as pendulum and cartpole problems. Numerical results confirm the scalability, accuracy, and robustness of our approach across both linear and nonlinear benchmarks.

Physics-Informed Approach for Exploratory Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman Equations via Policy Iterations

Generative modeling has emerged as a powerful approach for visuomotor policy learning, with diffusion models achieving strong results in robotic manipulation. However, they suffer from two major limitations: poor data efficiency and slow sampling due to iterative inference. While recent advances introduce equivariant architectures to address the former, slow sampling speed remains a challenge.
We propose Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy (EEFlow), a generative policy learning framework based on flow matching, which models a continuous path from noise to action using ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We theoretically show that under an isotropic Gaussian prior and an equivariant velocity field, EEFlow preserves equivariance in the learned action distribution, promoting better generalization across symmetric states and reducing data requirements.
To improve sampling efficiency, we introduce a second-order regularizer that penalizes acceleration. Since computing acceleration requires intractable marginal trajectories, we propose a novel surrogate loss that enables stable training using only readily available conditional trajectories.
Evaluated on extensive manipulation tasks, EEFlow matches or exceeds the performance of baselines while offering fast inference, highlighting its potential for high-performance, efficient robotic control.

EfficientFlow: Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy Learning for Embodied AI

The inherently low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging fundamentally impedes precise tissue microstructure characterization, rendering effective noise suppression a persistent challenge. Existing denoising methods frequently suffer from over-smoothing or distortion of microstructure information when handling spatially correlated or severe noise. To address these limitations, we propose UP$^2$-MAE fusion model, a self-supervised DWI denoising method based on Uncertainty-Propelled Physics and Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) fusion. This framework integrates two complementary branches: one leverages MAE to suppress noise through local context modeling, while the other constructs uncorrelated noisy pairs using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) physics and denoises them via a Noise2Noise approach, which can preserve texture details by exploiting directional relationships across diffusion encoding directions. To fully integrate the strengths of both branches, an uncertainty-propelled fusion strategy based on maximum likelihood estimation is proposed to derive the final denoised output. In addition, to further promote the performance, uncertainty-guided reconstruction and consistency loss are presented. Evaluations against state-of-the-art denoising methods on both simulated and acquired DW datasets confirm the efficacy of our approach.

Uncertainty-Propelled Physics-MAE Fusion for Self-Supervised Diffusion-Weighted Image Denoising

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is crucial for improving recommendation accuracy and generalization, yet traditional methods are often hindered by the reliance on shared user/item IDs, which are unavailable in most real-world scenarios. Consequently, many efforts have focused on learning disentangled representations through multi-domain joint training to bridge the domain gaps. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches show promise, they still face critical challenges, including: (1) the \textbf{item ID tokenization dilemma}, which leads to vocabulary explosion and fails to capture high-order collaborative knowledge; and (2) \textbf{insufficient domain-specific modeling} for the complex evolution of user interests and item semantics. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{GenCDR}, a novel \textbf{Gen}erative \textbf{C}ross-\textbf{D}omain \textbf{R}ecommendation framework. GenCDR first employs a \textbf{Domain-adaptive Tokenization} module, which generates disentangled semantic IDs for items by dynamically routing between a universal encoder and domain-specific adapters. Symmetrically, a \textbf{Cross-domain Autoregressive Recommendation} module models user preferences by fusing universal and domain-specific interests. Finally, a \textbf{Domain-aware Prefix-tree} enables efficient and accurate generation. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that GenCDR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available in the supplementary materials.

From IDs to Semantics: A Generative Framework for Cross-Domain Recommendation with Adaptive Semantic Tokenization

Most existing video moment retrieval methods rely on temporal sequences of frame- or clip-level features that primarily encode global visual and semantic information. However, such representations often fail to capture fine-grained object semantics and appearance, which are crucial for localizing moments described by object-oriented queries involving specific entities and their interactions. In particular, temporal dynamics at the object level have been largely overlooked, limiting the effectiveness of existing approaches in scenarios requiring detailed object-level reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose a novel object-centric framework for moment retrieval. Our method first extracts query-relevant objects using a scene graph parser and then generates scene graphs from video frames to represent these objects and their relationships. Based on the scene graphs, we construct object-level feature sequences that encode rich visual and semantic information. These sequences are processed by a relational tracklet transformer, which models spatio-temporal correlations among objects over time. By explicitly capturing object-level state changes, our framework enables more accurate localization of moments aligned with object-oriented queries. We evaluated our method on three benchmarks: Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and TACoS. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all benchmarks.

Object-Centric Framework for Video Moment Retrieval

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have played an increasingly important role in multimodal intelligence. However, the existing fine-tuning methods often ignore cross-modal heterogeneity, limiting their full potential. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy by injecting beneficial random noise, which outperforms previous methods and even surpasses full fine-tuning, with minimal additional parameters. The proposed Multimodal Noise Generator (MuNG) enables efficient modality fine-tuning by injecting customized noise into the frozen MLLMs. Specifically, we reformulate the reasoning process of MLLMs from a variational inference perspective, upon which we design a multimodal noise generator that dynamically analyzes cross-modal relationships in image-text pairs to generate task-adaptive beneficial noise. Injecting this type of noise into the MLLMs effectively suppresses irrelevant semantic components, leading to significantly improved cross-modal representation alignment and enhanced performance on downstream tasks. Experiments on two mainstream MLLMs, LLaVA and QwenVL, demonstrate that our method surpasses full-parameter fine-tuning and other existing fine-tuning approaches, while requiring adjustments to only about $1\sim2\%$ additional parameters. The relevant code is uploaded in the supplementary.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Khan-GCL: Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Based Graph Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

Similar lecture

Practical Guidelines for Model Merging in LLMs Pre-Training

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2026

Khan-GCL: Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Based Graph Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

Similar lecture

Practical Guidelines for Model Merging in LLMs Pre-Training

Downloads