Singapore

The text-to-SQL task is an active challenge in Natural Language Processing. Many existing solutions focus on using black-box language models extended with specialized components within customized end-to-end text-to-SQL pipelines. While these solutions use both closed-source proprietary language models and coding-oriented open-source models, there is a lack of research regarding SQL-specific small generative models. At the same time, recent advancements in self-correcting generation strategies show promise for improving the capabilities of existing architectures. The application of these concepts to the text-to-SQL task remains unexplored.
In this paper, we introduce RetrySQL, a new approach to training text-to-SQL generation models. We prepare reasoning steps for reference SQL queries and then corrupt them to create retry data that contains both incorrect and corrected steps, divided with a special token. We continuously pre-train open-source coding models with this data and demonstrate that retry steps yield an improvements of up to 4 and 9 percentage points for overall and challenging execution metrics, respectively, as compared to pre-training without retry data. We showcase that the self-correcting behavior is learned by the model and the increase in downstream accuracy metrics is a result of this additional skill. Finally, we incorporate RetrySQL-trained models into the full text-to-SQL pipeline and showcase that they are competitive in terms of execution accuracy with proprietary models that contain orders of magnitude more parameters.
RetrySQL demonstrates that self-correction can be learned in the text-to-SQL task and provides a novel way of improving generation accuracy for small SQL-oriented language models.

AAAI 2026

RetrySQL: Text-to-SQL Training with Retry Data for Self-Correcting Query Generation

nlp: code generation / program synthesis from natural language nlp: (large) language models nlp: applications

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*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.

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.

In this paper, we present Reed-Solomon coded single-stranded representation learning (RSRL), a novel end-to-end model for learning representations for lossless DNA storage of multi-type data.
In contrast to existing learning-based methods, the proposed RSRL is inspired by both error-correction codec and structural biology.
Specifically, RSRL first learns the representations for the subsequent storage from the binary data transformed by the Reed-Solomon codec.
Then, the representations are masked by an RS-code-informed mask to focus on correcting the burst errors occurring in the learning process.
With the decoded representations with error corrections, a novel biologically stabilized loss is formulated to regularize the data representations to possess stable single-stranded structures.
By incorporating these novel strategies, the proposed RSRL can learn highly durable, dense, and lossless representations for the subsequent storage tasks into DNA sequences.
The proposed RSRL has been compared with a number of strong baselines in real-world tasks of multi-type data storage.
The experimental results obtained demonstrate that RSRL can store diverse types of data with much higher information density and durability but much lower error rates.

Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Lossless DNA Storage

Recent advancements in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced audio-driven portrait animation. However, current methods still suffer from flickering, identity drift, and poor audio-visual synchronization. These issues primarily stem from entangled appearance-motion representations and unstable inference strategies. In this paper, we introduce **ConsistTalk**, a novel intensity-controllable and temporally consistent talking head generation framework with diffusion noise search inference. First, we propose an **optical flow-guided temporal module (OFT)** that decouples motion features from static appearance by leveraging facial optical flow, thereby reducing visual flicker and improving temporal consistency. Second, we present an **Audio-to-Intensity (A2I) model** obtained through multimodal teacher-student knowledge distillation. By transforming audio and facial velocity features into a frame-wise intensity sequence, the A2I model enables joint modeling of audio and visual motion, resulting in more natural dynamics. This further enables fine-grained, frame-wise control of motion dynamics while maintaining tight audio-visual synchronization. Third, we introduce a **diffusion noise initialization strategy (IC-Init)**. By enforcing explicit constraints on background coherence and motion continuity during inference-time noise search, we achieve better identity preservation and refine motion dynamics compared to the current autoregressive strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistTalk significantly outperforms prior methods in reducing flicker, preserving identity, and delivering temporally stable, high-fidelity talking head videos.

ConsistTalk: Intensity Controllable Temporally Consistent Talking Head Generation with Diffusion Noise Search

Recent advancements in diffusion models have made fine-tuning text-to-image models for personalization increasingly accessible, but have also raised significant concerns regarding unauthorized data usage and privacy infringement. Current protection methods are limited to passively degrading image quality, failing to achieve stable control. While Targeted Data Protection (TDP) offers a promising paradigm for active redirection toward user-specified target concepts, existing TDP attempts suffer from poor controllability due to snapshot-matching approaches that fail to account for complete learning dynamics. We introduce TAFAP (Trajectory Alignment via Fine-tuning with Adversarial Perturbations), the first method to successfully achieve effective TDP by controlling the entire training trajectory. Unlike snapshot-based methods whose protective influence is easily diluted as training progresses, TAFAP employs trajectory-matching inspired by dataset distillation to enforce persistent, verifiable transformations throughout fine-tuning. We validate our method through extensive experiments, demonstrating the first successful targeted transformation in diffusion models with simultaneous control over both identity and visual patterns. TAFAP significantly outperforms existing TDP attempts, achieving robust redirection toward target concepts while maintaining high image quality. This work enables verifiable safeguards and provides a new framework for controlling and tracing alterations in diffusion model outputs.

Targeted Data Protection for Diffusion Model by Matching Training Trajectory

Deploying multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in safety-critical systems faces significant challenges due to insufficient agent exploration and inadequate safety constraint guarantees. Current approaches are constrained by two fundamental limitations: inefficient exploration leading to suboptimal policies, and expected-cost-based constraint frameworks failing to ensure full-process safety. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel safety-aware maximum entropy MARL framework using Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a joint safety metric, which quantifies constraint satisfaction under worst-case scenarios for multi-agent systems. Moreover, we develop the Worst-Case Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (WCMASAC) algorithm, incorporating sequential update mechanisms and maximum entropy optimization for heterogeneous agents, enhanced with distributed safety critics. Theoretically, we establish the monotonic improvement property, guaranteed constraint satisfaction, and convergence to a generalized Nash equilibrium for WCMASAC. Extensive experiments on Safety-Gymnasium based benchmarks demonstrate that WCMASAC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both task reward acquisition and safety constraint violation reduction, while exhibiting superior exploration efficiency and risk-aware control capabilities.

Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Distributional Safety Critic and Maximum Entropy Optimization

Verifying the complex and multi-step reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical challenge, as holistic methods often overlook localized flaws. 
Step-by-step validation is a promising alternative, yet existing methods are often rigid. 
They struggle to adapt to diverse reasoning structures, from formal proofs to informal natural language narratives. 
To address this adaptability gap, we propose the Graph of Verification (GoV), a novel framework for adaptable and multi-granular verification. 
GoV's core innovation is its flexible node block architecture. 
This mechanism allows GoV to adaptively adjust its verification granularity—from atomic steps for formal tasks to entire paragraphs for natural language—to match the native structure of the reasoning process. 
This flexibility allows GoV to resolve the fundamental trade-off between verification precision and robustness.
Experiments on both well-structured and loosely-structured benchmarks demonstrate GoV's versatility. 
The results show that GoV's adaptive approach significantly outperforms both holistic baselines and other state-of-the-art decomposition-based methods, establishing a new standard for training-free reasoning verification.

Graph of Verification: Structured Verification of LLM Reasoning with Directed Acyclic Graphs

The exponential growth of streaming multi-modal data presents critical challenges for cross-modal retrieval: distribution shifts, modality gap, and scarce labels. Semi-supervised online cross-modal hashing has gained increasing interest due to its ability to encode complex streaming data and update hash functions simultaneously. Nevertheless, existing methods can hardly generate high-quality unsupervised hash codes, which fundamentally limits diversity and flexibility‌ during the retrieval process. To this end, we propose a novel method named Prototype Evolution Online Cross-modal Hashing (PEOCH). With semi-supervised streaming data driving prototype evolution, precise and stable hash codes can be generated for both labeled and unlabeled data. Specifically, two simultaneous prototype updates are performed: labeled samples push semantic knowledge into the prototypes, while unlabeled samples pull prototypes to guide hash code generation. A co-optimization mechanism is designed to ensure the prototypes continuously evolve based on the entire streaming data. Besides, an elasticity regularizer integrates discriminability and smoothness constraints, improving the reliability of prototypes. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees that ensure prototype stability. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that PEOCH outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 6.7\% in mAP@all across various retrieval tasks.

PEOCH: Online Cross-Modal Hashing with Semi-Supervised Streaming Data Driving Prototype Evolution

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have recently become a more prevalent choice for large language models (LLMs) than dense architectures due to their superior performance. However, billions of parameters bring MoE LLMs a huge cost for deployment and inference. To address these issues, knowledge distillation (KD) has become a widely adopted technique to compress LLMs. Existing KD methods for LLMs can be divided into *dense-to-dense* and *moe-to-dense* distillation. *Dense-to-dense* distillation transfers knowledge between single dense LLMs, while *moe-to-dense* distillation attempts to transfer knowledge between the MoE LLMs and the dense LLMs. However, the architectural mismatch prevents the student from fully absorbing knowledge when distilling MoE LLMs. To address this limitation, we investigate a new distillation setting, *moe-to-moe*, which aims to fully leverage expert knowledge of teachers and enable the student to absorb it more effectively. Compared to *dense-to-dense* and *moe-to-dense*, *moe-to-moe* suffers from two imbalance issues. First, expert-coverage deficiency reflects an imbalanced knowledge transfer of teacher experts: traditional distillation utilizes only the few experts activated by the teacher router. Second, routing imbalance appears when the student routing distribution drifts from the teacher, which makes it difficult for students to learn how to distribute different experts. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel distillation framework for *moe-to-moe*, **B**alanced **Distill**ation (**B-Distill**), which equally spreads teacher expertise across student experts while regularizing the student router toward teacher-consistent balance. First, to mitigate expert-coverage deficiency, we introduce Monte Carlo exploration, which stochastically perturbs router probabilities so every teacher and student expert is sampled without enlarging the search space. Second, to correct routing imbalance and avert load collapse, we propose an entropy-aware router distillation mechanism that aligns the student router with the teacher while curbing over-concentration. Experiments in various datasets show that B-Distill outperforms baselines by up to 6.6\% in Rouge-L. Our code can be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/moedistill-D5FC/.

Balanced Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models with Mix-of-Experts

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to enhance the performance of lightweight student networks through the guidance of teacher models. However, the existing methods have deficiencies in two key aspects: First, these methods rely heavily on static representation alignment, failing to account for optimization sensitivity in different directions within the distillation subspace; second, they lack a fine-grained mechanism to align critical directional features. To address these issues, we propose Direction Sensitivity–based Knowledge Distillation method (DSKD), which can quantitatively measure the sensitivity of each direction to the loss function at different training stages and dynamically select the optimization direction accordingly. Meanwhile, we designed a directional sensitivities weighted distillation loss. By aligning the parameter matrices of the teacher and student models in the key directions, we can more effectively transfer knowledge and improve the distillation effect. We combined DSKD with multiple advanced distillation strategies and conducted an empirical evaluation in the GLUE benchmark and CIFAR-100. The results showed that this method could significantly improve the performance of existing distillation techniques.

Direction Sensitivity–Based Knowledge Distillation: Optimization-Aware Low-Rank Knowledge Transfer

Accurately forecasting the spatiotemporal dynamics of biological systems, such as human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cardiac organoids, from microscopy time-series is a critical challenge in biomedicine with profound implications for drug discovery. Existing generative models often fail to capture the intricate dynamics of organoid development, struggling with their irregular morphology, indistinct boundaries, and complex spatiotemporal patterns. To overcome these limitations, we introduce OrgaCast, a novel multimodal conditional diffusion model for high-fidelity organoid forecasting. OrgaCast uniquely conditions the generative process on three synergistic modalities: (i) historical image sequences, captured by a dedicated spatiotemporal control module; (ii) structured numerical metadata defining experimental conditions; and (iii) descriptive text captions summarizing the biological context. This comprehensive conditioning enables the generation of forecasts with high visual accuracy and biological plausibility. Furthermore, to enhance the model's utility in critical research settings, we introduce a post-hoc uncertainty quantification method that produces intuitive confidence maps, bolstering the interpretability and trustworthiness of predictions. Extensive experiments on a challenging cardiac organoid dataset demonstrate that OrgaCast outperforms existing baselines in metrics such as SSIM, PSNR, and biological plausibility scores. Our framework presents a robust solution for biological forecasting, promising to accelerate research discovery while minimizing experimental costs and manual effort.

OrgaCast: A Trustworthy Spatiotemporal Diffusion Model for Fluorescence Organoid Forecasting

The rapid proliferation of AI-generated images necessitates effective watermarking techniques to protect intellectual property and detect fraudulent content. While existing training-based watermarking methods show promise, they often struggle with generalization across diverse prompts, introduce visible artifacts, and require substantial external data for retraining on new model variants. To this end, we propose Modular Self-Augmented Training for Latent Diffusion Models (MSAT-LDM), a novel and transferable watermarking framework. MSAT-LDM integrates two key components: (1) Self-Augmented Training (SAT) leverages an internally generated "free generation" distribution to train the watermark module, aligning the training and testing phases without relying on external data. We theoretically demonstrate that this design improves generalization by inducing a tighter generalization bound. (2) Modular watermark architecture is a plug-and-play module that can be independently fine-tuned, enabling efficient adaptation to various fine-tuned backbones or LoRA-enhanced variants with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments show that MSAT-LDM achieves robust watermarking, significantly improves the quality of watermarked images across diverse prompts, and exhibits strong transfer performance--all without the need for external training data.

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Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Lossless DNA Storage

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