Singapore

Mixture of experts (MoE) dynamically routes inputs to specialised expert networks to scale model capacity with low inference overhead. However, the excessive parameters growth in MoE models poses challenges in low-resource settings. To address these issues, MoE with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a lightweight adaptation paradigm that distributes knowledge among experts via multiple LoRA blocks. 
Existing MoE-PEFT methods can be broadly categorized into External and Internal PEFT methods. 
External PEFT methods incorporate lightweight models into existing MoE architectures without modifying their routing, which limits the model’s parameters efficiency. 
To overcome these issues, Internal PEFT methods integrate MoE architectures into PEFT, enabling minimal parameters overhead. However, they still face two major challenges: (1) lack of expert functional differentiation, resulting in overlapping specialization across modules, and (2) absence of a structured attribution mechanism to guide expert selection based on semantic relevance.
To alleviate these challenges, we propose TopicLoRA, a novel three-stage framework that leverages topic knowledge as semantic anchors to guide expert allocation. Specifically, (1) to address expert redundancy, we construct a topic-level prior graph using Graph Neural Network-enhanced representation learning over Big-bench categories, enforcing structural separation among expert embeddings, and (2) to introduce semantic attribution, we design a dual-loss training mechanism that softly aligns input-query relevance with topic-guided routing distributions via KL divergence.
Extensive experiments on representative datasets (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K, Flanv2) demonstrate that TopicLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT baselines by 2.40\% on average in accuracy. Notably, the maximum improvement is 4.21\%. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate that our framework&#39;s robustness to intricate topics and input sequence variations, which stems from the dual-loss training mechanism. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TopicLoRA-00AF/.

AAAI 2026

Optimizing LoRA Allocation of MoE with the Alignment of Topic Correlation

lora

mixture of experts

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Mixture of experts (MoE) dynamically routes inputs to specialised expert networks to scale model capacity with low inference overhead. However, the excessive parameters growth in MoE models poses challenges in low-resource settings. To address these issues, MoE with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a lightweight adaptation paradigm that distributes knowledge among experts via multiple LoRA blocks. 
Existing MoE-PEFT methods can be broadly categorized into External and Internal PEFT methods. 
External PEFT methods incorporate lightweight models into existing MoE architectures without modifying their routing, which limits the model’s parameters efficiency. 
To overcome these issues, Internal PEFT methods integrate MoE architectures into PEFT, enabling minimal parameters overhead. However, they still face two major challenges: (1) lack of expert functional differentiation, resulting in overlapping specialization across modules, and (2) absence of a structured attribution mechanism to guide expert selection based on semantic relevance.
To alleviate these challenges, we propose TopicLoRA, a novel three-stage framework that leverages topic knowledge as semantic anchors to guide expert allocation. Specifically, (1) to address expert redundancy, we construct a topic-level prior graph using Graph Neural Network-enhanced representation learning over Big-bench categories, enforcing structural separation among expert embeddings, and (2) to introduce semantic attribution, we design a dual-loss training mechanism that softly aligns input-query relevance with topic-guided routing distributions via KL divergence.
Extensive experiments on representative datasets (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K, Flanv2) demonstrate that TopicLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT baselines by 2.40\% on average in accuracy. Notably, the maximum improvement is 4.21\%. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate that our framework's robustness to intricate topics and input sequence variations, which stems from the dual-loss training mechanism. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TopicLoRA-00AF/.

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.<br><br>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>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.

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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.

While large language models (LLMs) have recently made tremendous progress towards solving challenging AI problems, they have done so at increasingly steep computational and API costs. We propose a novel strategy where we combine multiple LLM models with varying cost/accuracy tradeoffs in an agentic manner, where models and tools are run in sequence as determined by an orchestration model to minimize cost subject to a user-specified level of reliability; this constraint is formalized using conformal prediction to provide guarantees. To solve this problem, we propose Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO),
a training paradigm that integrates constrained policy optimization with off-policy reinforcement learning and recent advances in online conformal prediction. CCPO jointly optimizes a cost-aware policy (score function) and an adaptive threshold.
Across two multi-hop question answering benchmarks, CCPO achieves up to a 30\% cost reduction compared to other cost-aware baselines and LLM-guided methods without compromising reliability. Our approach provides a principled and practical framework for deploying LLM agents that are significantly more cost-effective while maintaining reliability.

Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization for Cost-Effective LLM Agents

Acoustophoresis uses sound waves to manipulate small objects in mid-air and has broad potential in various applications. However, stable multi-particle levitation remains challenging due to complex acoustic dynamics and limitations of existing models. We introduce AcoustoReinforce, a reinforcement learning-based path planner that autonomously controls the motion of multiple levitated particles. Leveraging a decentralized architecture, it learns local neural policies that generate particle trajectories independently, enabling scalable, communication-free control even in densely populated acoustic fields. To ensure physical feasibility, acoustic trapping strength is incorporated as a constraint during both training and inference, producing trajectories that are collision-free, acoustically stable, and physically realizable within real-world system constraints. Experiments on a real-world levitation platform show that AcoustoReinforce outperforms state-of-the-art planners, improving task success rates by up to 130% across diverse configurations. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning-based decentralized control for complex multi-object acoustophoresis in real environments.

AcoustoReinforce: Multi-Particle Acoustophoretic Path Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Music emotion recognition is a key task in symbolic music understanding (SMER). Recent approaches have shown promising results by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., MIDIBERT, a benchmark in symbolic music understanding) to map musical semantics to emotional labels. While these models effectively capture distributional musical semantics, they often overlook tonal structures, particularly musical modes, which play a critical role in emotional perception according to music psychology. In this paper, we investigate the representational capacity of MIDIBERT and identify its limitations in capturing mode-emotion associations. To address this issue, we propose a Mode-Guided Enhancement (MoGE) strategy that incorporates psychological insights on mode into the model. Specifically, we first conduct a mode augmentation analysis, which reveals that MIDIBERT fails to effectively encode emotion-mode correlations. We then identify the least emotion-relevant layer within MIDIBERT and introduce a Mode-guided Feature-wise linear modulation injection (MoFi) framework to inject explicit mode features, thereby enhancing the model's capability in emotional representation and inference. Extensive experiments on the EMOPIA and VGMIDI datasets demonstrate that our mode injection strategy significantly improves SMER performance, achieving accuracies of 75.2% and 59.1%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of mode-guided modeling in symbolic music emotion recognition.

Let the Model Learn to Feel: Mode-Guided Tonality Injection for Symbolic Music Emotion Recognition

Committee-selection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules. In this work, we propose a data-driven framework to evaluate how frequently voting rules violate axioms across diverse preference distributions in practice, shifting away from the binary perspective of axiom satisfaction given by worst-case analysis. Using this framework, we analyze the relationship between multi-winner voting rules and their axiomatic performance under several preference distributions, and propose a methodology for systematically minimizing axioms violations. Our results suggest that data-driven approaches to social choice can inform the design of new voting systems and support the continuation of data-driven research in social choice.

What Voting Rules Actually Do: A Data-Driven Analysis of Multi-Winner Voting

We present OpenDriveVLA, a Vision-Language Action (VLA) model designed for end-to-end autonomous driving, built upon open-source large language models. OpenDriveVLA generates spatially-grounded driving actions by leveraging multimodal inputs, including both 2D and 3D instance-aware visual representations, ego vehicle states, and language commands. To bridge the modality gap between driving visual representations and language embeddings, we introduce a hierarchical vision-language alignment process, projecting both 2D and 3D structured visual tokens into a unified semantic space. Furthermore, we incorporate structured agent–environment–ego interaction modeling into the autoregressive decoding process, enabling the model to capture fine-grained spatial dependencies and behavior-aware dynamics critical for reliable trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OpenDriveVLA achieves state-of-the-art results across open-loop trajectory planning and driving-related question-answering tasks. Qualitative analyses further illustrate its superior capability to follow high-level driving commands and robustly generate trajectories under challenging scenarios, highlighting its potential for next-generation end-to-end autonomous driving.

OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model

Recently, Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) have sparked a new wave of research, achieving impressive results in tasks such as audio-video understanding and real-time environment perception. However, hallucination issues still persist. Similar to the bimodal setting, the priors from the text modality tend to dominate, leading OLLMs to rely more heavily on textual cues while neglecting visual and audio information. In addition, fully multimodal scenarios introduce new challenges. Most existing models align visual or auditory modalities with text independently during training, while ignoring the intrinsic correlations between video and its corresponding audio. This oversight results in hallucinations when reasoning requires interpreting hidden audio cues embedded in video content. To address these challenges, we propose OmniDPO, a preference-alignment framework designed to mitigate hallucinations in OLLMs. Specifically, OmniDPO incorporates two strategies: (1) constructing text-preference sample pairs to enhance the model’s understanding of audio-video interactions; and (2) constructing multimodal-preference sample pairs to strengthen the model’s attention to visual and auditory information. By tackling both challenges, OmniDPO effectively improves multimodal grounding and reduces hallucination. Experiments conducted on two OLLMs demonstrate that OmniDPO not only effectively mitigates multimodal hallucinations but also significantly enhances the models' reasoning capabilities across modalities. All code and datasets will be publicly released.

OmniDPO: A Preference Optimization Framework to Address Omni-Modal Hallucination

Communication networks are essential for our economy and our everyday lives. This makes them lucrative targets for attacks. Today, we see an ongoing battle between criminals that try to disrupt our key communication networks and security professionals that try to mitigate these attacks. However, today's networks, like the Internet or peer-to-peer networks among smart devices, are not controlled by a single authority, but instead consist of many independently administrated entities that are interconnected. Thus, both the decisions of how to interconnect and how to secure against potential attacks are taken in a decentralized way by selfish agents.

This strategic setting, with agents that want to interconnect and potential attackers that want to disrupt the network, was captured via an influential game-theoretic model by Goyal, Jabbari, Kearns, Khanna, and Morgenstern (WINE 2016). We revisit this model and show improved tight bounds on the achieved robustness of networks created by selfish agents. As our main result, we show that such networks can resist attacks of a large class of potential attackers, i.e., these networks maintain asymptotically optimal welfare post attack. This improves several bounds and resolves an open problem. Along the way, we show the counter-intuitive result, that attackers that aim at minimizing the social welfare post attack do not actually inflict the greatest possible damage.

Optimal Welfare in Noncooperative Network Formation Under Attack

We revisit the classic ski rental problem through the lens of Bayesian decision-making and machine-learned predictions. While traditional algorithms minimize worst-case cost without assumptions, and recent learning-augmented approaches leverage noisy forecasts with robustness guarantees, our work unifies these perspectives. We propose a discrete Bayesian framework that maintains exact posterior distributions over the time horizon, enabling principled uncertainty quantification and seamless incorporation of expert priors. Our algorithm achieves prior-dependent competitive guarantees and gracefully interpolates between worst-case and fully-informed settings. 
Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates superior empirical performance across diverse scenarios, achieving near-optimal results under accurate priors while maintaining robust worst-case guarantees. This framework naturally extends to incorporate multiple predictions, non-uniform priors, and contextual information, highlighting the practical advantages of Bayesian reasoning in online decision problems with imperfect predictions.

Learning-Augmented Ski Rental with Discrete Distribution: A Bayesian Approach

Multi-objective multi-armed bandit (MO-MAB) problems traditionally aim to achieve Pareto optimality. However, real-world scenarios often involve users with varying preferences across objectives, resulting in a Pareto-optimal arm that may score high for one user but perform quite poorly for another. This highlights the need for customized learning, a factor often overlooked in prior research. To address this, we study a preference-aware MO-MAB framework in the presence of explicit user preference. It shifts the focus from achieving Pareto optimality to further optimizing within the Pareto front under preference-centric customization. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical study of customized MO-MAB optimization with explicit user preferences. Motivated by practical applications, we explore two scenarios: unknown preference and hidden preference, each presenting unique challenges for algorithm design and analysis. At the core of our algorithms are preference estimation and preference-aware optimization mechanisms to adapt to user preferences effectively. We further develop novel analytical techniques to establish near-optimal regret of the proposed algorithms. Strong empirical performance confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Provably Efficient Multi-Objective Bandit Algorithms Under Preference-Centric Customization

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agent-tool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench—a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.

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