Singapore

The rapid growth of Ethereum has made it more important to quickly and accurately detect smart contract vulnerabilities. While machine learning–based methods have shown some promises, many still rely on rule-based preprocessing designed by domain experts. Such rule-based preprocessing methods often discard crucial context from the source code, potentially causing certain vulnerabilities to be overlooked and limiting adaptability to newly emerging threats. We introduce \textit{BugSweeper}, an end-to-end deep learning framework that detects vulnerabilities directly from the source code without manual engineering. BugSweeper represents each Solidity function as a function-level abstract syntax graph (FLAG), a novel graph structure that combines its abstract syntax tree (AST) with enriched control-flow and data-flow semantics. Then, our two-stage graph neural network model analyzes these graphs. The first-stage GNN filters noise from syntax graphs, while the second-stage GNN conducts high-level reasoning to detect diverse vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments on real-world contracts show that BugSweeper significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art detection methods. By removing the need for handcrafted rules, our approach offers a robust, automated, and scalable solution for securing smart contracts without any dependence on security experts.

AAAI 2026

BugSweeper: Function-Level Detection of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Using Graph Neural Networks

solidity

ethereum

smart contract

ai4code

vulnerability detection

graph neural network

## 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.

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.

Yaqing Wang’s research focuses on generalizing from a few
examples, aiming to build data-efficient, adaptive, and
explainable AI. Her early work established a unifying
framework for few-shot learning, which highlighted the
challenges of unreliable learning under sparse data and
articulated three canonical scenarios—scientific scarcity,
cold-start personalization, and annotation efficiency.
Building on this foundation, she has developed algorithms
addressing key real-world challenges: molecular property
prediction and drug–drug interaction under limited data in
drug discovery, recommendation models that overcome
cold-start issues and are deployed in large-scale
platforms, and efficient methods for intent recognition and
gesture sensing where annotation or interaction is costly.
Her recent work explores the synergy between meta-learning
and in-context learning, and introduces personalized agents
that adapt to user preferences with only a handful of
interactions. These contributions reflect her continued
efforts toward advancing few-shot learning in both theory
and practice, with growing impact in AI for science and
personalization.

From Few-Shot Learning to Data-Efficient Intelligence

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) in sensitive domains leads to growing interest in how their confidence scores correspond to fairness and bias. This study examines the alignment between LLM-predicted confidence and human-annotated bias judgments. Focusing on gender bias, the research investigates probability confidence calibration in contexts involving gendered pronoun resolution. The goal is to evaluate if calibration metrics based on predicted confidence scores effectively capture fairness-related disparities in LLMs. The results show that, among the six state-of-the-art models, Gemma-2 demonstrates the worst calibration according to the gender bias benchmark. The primary contribution of this work is a fairness-aware evaluation of LLMs confidence calibration, offering guidance for ethical deployment. In addition, we introduce a new calibration metric, Gender-ECE, designed to measure gender disparities in resolution tasks.

The Confidence Trap: Gender Bias and Predictive Certainty in LLMs

Object state understanding aims at recognizing the co-occurrence and transitions of multiple object states in videos. While learning from videos handles seen object states well, it struggles with novel ones. We address this task in a zero-shot setting by extracting state-specific knowledge from pre-trained models and using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to verify whether such knowledge is visually grounded in videos. However, the extracted knowledge varies in its ability to distinguish states, and VLM observations are not always trustworthy. To address this issue, we propose a trust-aware knowledge-guided method to model knowledge trustworthiness and emphasize highly discriminative knowledge that VLMs can reliably observe. Specifically, we collect spatial knowledge for each object state from retrieved images and cues generated from a Large Language Model, then use VLMs to vote on each knowledge element by scoring its visual consistency with the video. In addition to a single scene, temporal dependencies of object states across scenes are also captured using a generative VLM. Under spatial and temporal constraints, we propose an adaptive knowledge refinement module that iteratively updates knowledge reliability weights to achieve a global consensus in object state inference across the video. Finally, object states are inferred by combining the refined weights with VLM voting results. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

What to Trust? A Trust-aware Knowledge-guided Method for Zero-shot Object State Understanding in Videos

Multimodal remote sensing image joint classification has achieved significant progress. However, existing methods primarily focus on designing modality-specific networks, lacking adaptive generalization capabilities in diverse and dynamic modality combinations encountered in real-world scenarios. Inspired by the generalization capabilities of visual foundation model in downstream tasks, we propose a unified Text-guided Arbitrary Modalitiy Prompting (T-APT) framework, which leverages complementary fused features to drive the foundation model and employs text-guided modality-specific prior knowledge as cross-modal prompts to fine-tune a pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) model. Specifically, a Mamba-Based Arbitrary Modal-Focused Feature Capture (MAMF-FC) module is designed to extract complementary joint features and modality-specific prior knowledge from arbitrary modalities through a shared-specific scanning encoder-decoder architecture. Subsequently, a Text-Guided Modality-Aware Prompt Tuning (TMPT) module is proposed to support the adaptation of fused features to the foundation model, enabling our arbitrary remote sensing image classification task. Extensive experiments on public datasets spanning multispectral (MS), hyperspectral (HS), light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) modalities demonstrate that our T-APT achieves classification performance comparable to specialized networks across arbitrary modal combinations.

T-APT: Text-Guided Modality-Aware Prompt Tuning for Arbitrary Multimodal Remote Sensing Data Joint Classification

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have broadened their applicability across diverse tasks, yet specialized domains still require targeted post-training. Among existing methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) stands out for its efficiency, leveraging groupwise relative rewards while avoiding costly value function learning. However, GRPO treats candidate responses as independent, overlooking semantic interactions such as complementarity and contradiction. To address this challenge, we first introduce a Structural Causal Model (SCM) that reveals hidden dependencies among candidate responses induced by conditioning on a final integrated output—forming a collider structure. Then, our causal analysis leads to two insights: (1) projecting responses onto a causally-informed subspace improves prediction quality, and (2) this projection yields a better baseline than query-only conditioning. Building on these insights, we propose Group Causal Policy Optimization (GCPO), which integrates causal structure into optimization through two key components: a causally-informed reward adjustment and a novel KL-regularization term that aligns the policy with a causally-projected reference distribution. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that GCPO consistently surpasses existing methods—including GRPO—across multiple reasoning benchmarks.

Group Causal Policy Optimization for Post-Training Large Language Models

The Minimum Dominating Set (MDS) problem is a well-established combinatorial optimization problem with numerous real-world applications. Its NP-hard nature makes it increasingly difficult to obtain exact solutions as the graph size grows. This paper introduces ParDS, an exact algorithm developed to address the MDS problem within the branch-and-bound framework. ParDS features two key innovations: an advanced linear programming technique that yields tighter lower bounds and a set of novel reduction rules that dynamically simplify instances throughout the solving process. Compared to the leading exact algorithms presented at IJCAI 2023 and 2024, ParDS demonstrates theoretically superior lower-bound quality. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets highlight several significant advantages of ParDS: it achieves the fastest solving times in 70% of graph categories, especially on large, sparse graphs, delivers a speed-up of up to 3,411 times on the fastest individual instance, and successfully solves 16 out of 43 instances that other algorithms were unable to resolve within the 5-hour time limit. 
These findings establish ParDS as a state-of-the-art solution for exactly solving the MDS problem.

Exact Optimization for Minimum Dominating Sets

We study fair allocations of {\em indivisible} goods among agents with heterogeneous monotone valuations. As fair we consider the allocations that are envy-free-up-to-any-good (EFX). Finding if EFX allocations always exist, even for agents with additive valuations, is a major open problem in Fair Division. 
Christodoulou et al. (2023) introduced the (multi-hyper)graph setting, where agents and goods are represented by vertices and edges of a graph, respectively, and only the endpoints of an edge may have non-zero marginal value for it. We show that for \textit{hypergraphs} with girth at least 4 and agents with \textit{general monotone} valuations there always exists an EFX allocation and can be constructed in polynomial time. We generalize our approach to also show that multi-hypergraphs with girth (on the simple hypergraph) at least 4 always admit an EFX allocation, as long as there exists a single vertex whose adjacent edges have multiplicity at most the size of that edge minus 2; our construction in this case needs pseudo-polynomial time.

EFX Allocation in (Multi)Hypergraphs

Public health experts need scalable methods to monitor large volumes of health data (e.g., human-reported cases, hospitalizations, deaths). These methods must identify individual data points that may indicate significant events, such as outbreaks, or reveal data quality issues. Identifying, triaging, and analyzing these data points in real-time is critical for preventing downstream errors in forecasting or policy. Traditional alert-based data monitoring systems, used for decades in practice, fail to identify relevant data events for several reasons. For example, these systems may not output real-time results from large data volumes, or they may return tens of thousands of unhelpful alerts. 

We introduce a human-in-the-loop AI system for public health data monitoring that uses a ranking-based AI anomaly detection method. This system was developed through a multi-year interdisciplinary collaboration with participatory design from researchers, engineers, and public health data experts. From this process, we identified system goals, such as user control and efficiency and designed a system that balances these goals. This system has since been deployed at a national public health organization and analyzes up to 5 million data points daily. A three-month longitudinal deployment evaluation revealed a significant improvement in system goals, including a 54x increase in data reviewer efficiency and increased engagement compared to traditional alert-based methods.

Reducing Alert Fatigue Through AI Ranking: A Deployed Public Health Data Monitoring System

Human trafficking, affecting over 50 million people globally, is a complex criminal enterprise in which traffickers actively conceal and distribute information across fragmented and often illicit online platforms. Traditional investigative tools are ill-suited for detecting patterns across such obfuscated, heterogeneous data. This paper presents Domain-specific Insight Graphs (DIG), an investigative AI search engine designed to operate at web scale and enable non-technical decision-makers, such as law enforcement and prosecutors, to rapidly uncover actionable leads in human trafficking investigations. DIG employs a novel AI pipeline that ingests large, diverse web corpora (including trafficking-relevant advertisements), cleans and normalizes extracted information, and links entities into a semantic knowledge graph. A domain-optimized search layer allows investigators to traverse these graphs to identify potential victims, perpetrators, and trafficking networks. Unlike commercial alternatives, DIG was released free of charge, open-sourced, and deployed to over 200 U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies through the DARPA Memex program. Deployment results demonstrate measurable impact: in New York, agencies using DIG reported a drop in sex worker arrests and an increase in trafficking-related arrests from <1% to over 60%, disrupting cycles of victim re-victimization. The system has been credited in high-profile prosecutions and received endorsements from District Attorneys. This paper details the problem context, AI approach, deployment process, operational challenges, and lessons learned from maintaining DIG post-federal funding, including navigating intellectual property for open release and sustaining the system via philanthropic support. DIG exemplifies how AI-driven investigative tools can deliver lasting societal benefit through targeted, innovative application in high-stakes domains.

A Deployed Investigative AI Search Engine for Combating Human Trafficking at Web Scale

Poaching poses significant threats to wildlife and biodiversity. A valuable step in reducing poaching is to forecast poacher behavior, which can inform patrol planning and other conservation interventions. Existing poaching prediction methods based on linear models or decision trees lack the expressivity to capture complex, nonlinear spatiotemporal patterns. Recent advances in generative modeling, particularly flow matching, offer a more flexible alternative. However, training such models on real-world poaching data faces two central obstacles: imperfect detection of poaching events and limited data. To address imperfect detection, we integrate flow matching with an occupancy-based detection model and train the flow in latent space to infer the underlying occupancy state. To mitigate data scarcity, we adopt a composite flow initialized from a linear-model prediction rather than random noise which is the standard in diffusion models, injecting prior knowledge and improving generalization. Evaluations on datasets from two national parks in Uganda show consistent gains in predictive accuracy.

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