Singapore

In this paper we address the problem of discovering causal relationships from observational event sequence data.
Existing methods typically assume that events are instantaneous point events, however in many real-world settings, events have duration.
For example, in healthcare, a patient&#39;s symptoms may persist over a time interval and influence clinical actions while ongoing.
To address this, we introduce a causal model for interval-based event sequences that captures rich causal structures, including interactions between events and causal mechanisms that depend on whether other events are ongoing.
We prove that our model is identifiable in the limit and present a practical causal discovery algorithm, Niagara, grounded in the algorithmic Markov condition.
To select among candidate models, we employ a minimum description length (MDL) criterion, enabling robust inference even with limited data.
We validate our approach on synthetic and real data and demonstrate its utility on a real-world medical case study, where it uncovers meaningful causal relationships from noisy, interval-based event data.

AAAI 2026

Causal Discovery from Interval-Based Event Sequences

event sequences

causal discovery

causality

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper we address the problem of discovering causal relationships from observational event sequence data.
Existing methods typically assume that events are instantaneous point events, however in many real-world settings, events have duration.
For example, in healthcare, a patient's symptoms may persist over a time interval and influence clinical actions while ongoing.
To address this, we introduce a causal model for interval-based event sequences that captures rich causal structures, including interactions between events and causal mechanisms that depend on whether other events are ongoing.
We prove that our model is identifiable in the limit and present a practical causal discovery algorithm, Niagara, grounded in the algorithmic Markov condition.
To select among candidate models, we employ a minimum description length (MDL) criterion, enabling robust inference even with limited data.
We validate our approach on synthetic and real data and demonstrate its utility on a real-world medical case study, where it uncovers meaningful causal relationships from noisy, interval-based event data.

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.

My research lies at the intersection of causality,
reinforcement learning, world models, and multi-agent
systems. I aim to develop causal foundation world models
that enable agents to interpret the past, reason about the
future, and act reliably in dynamic, non-stationary, and
open-ended environments. My work spans causal
representation learning (e.g., CausalVAE), causal reasoning
in large language models, and causality-driven exploration
in open-ended worlds. These contributions have appeared in
leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and KDD,
and have been recognized through over 770 citations and the
Rising Star in AI award (2024). Looking forward, my agenda
focuses on scalable, trustworthy causal world models for
healthcare, robotics, scientific discovery, and digital
systems.

Toward Causal Foundation World Models: From Representation to Decision-Making

Surface water dynamics play a critical role in Earth’s climate system, influencing ecosystems, agriculture, disaster resilience, and sustainable development. Yet monitoring rivers and surface water at fine spatial and temporal scales remains challenging---especially for narrow or sediment-rich rivers that are poorly captured by low-resolution satellite data. To address this, we introduce RiverScope, a high-resolution dataset developed through collaboration between computer science and hydrology experts. RiverScope comprises 1,145 high-resolution images (covering 2,577 square kilometers) with expert-labeled river and surface water masks, requiring over 100 hours of manual annotation. Each image is co-registered with Sentinel-2, SWOT, and the SWOT River Database (SWORD), enabling the evaluation of cost-accuracy trade-offs across sensors---a key consideration for operational water monitoring. We also establish the first global, high-resolution benchmark for river width estimation, achieving a median error of 7.2 meters---significantly outperforming existing satellite-derived methods. We extensively evaluate deep networks across multiple architectures (e.g., CNNs and transformers), pretraining strategies (e.g., supervised and self-supervised), and training datasets (e.g., ImageNet and satellite imagery). Our best-performing models combine the benefits of transfer learning with the use of all the multispectral PlanetScope channels via learned adaptors. RiverScope provides a valuable resource for fine-scale and multi-sensor hydrological modeling, supporting climate adaptation and sustainable water management.

RiverScope: High-Resolution River Masking Dataset

Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities under zero-shot settings. However, tuning the learnable prompts solely based on unlabeled test data may induce prompt optimization bias, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the underlying causes of prompt optimization bias from both the model and data perspectives. In terms of the model, the entropy minimization objective typically focuses on reducing the entropy of model predictions while overlooking their correctness. This can result in overconfident yet incorrect outputs, thereby compromising the quality of prompt optimization. On the data side, prompts affected by optimization bias can introduce misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which further aggravates the prompt optimization bias. To this end, we propose a Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning method. Specifically, we first introduce a dynamic retrieval-augmented modulation module that retrieves high-confidence knowledge from a dynamic knowledge base using the test image feature as a query, and uses the retrieved knowledge to modulate the predictions. Guided by the refined predictions, we further develop a reliability-aware prompt optimization module that incorporates a confidence-based weighted ensemble and cross-modal consistency distillation to impose regularization constraints during prompt tuning. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmark datasets involving both natural distribution shifts and cross-datasets generalization demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines, validating its effectiveness in mitigating prompt optimization bias.

Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Graph anomaly detection is emerging as a critical technology for addressing increasingly complex and dynamic risk environments. 
Although unsupervised graph anomaly detection has advanced under the graph representation learning, directly applying these paradigms remains fundamentally misaligned with anomaly detection objectives.
In this work, we highlight two key insights: graph neural networks are often suboptimal as feature extractors due to neighborhood aggregation diluting anomaly signals, and reliance on local inconsistency mining is inadequate for comprehensive anomaly detection, as it often fails to identify anomalies hidden within camouflaged communities.
Based on these insights, we propose multiscale inconsistency learning for graph anomaly detection (MI-GAD), a novel framework that integrates both local and global anomaly signals. Specifically, individual node representations are projected onto a common hypersphere to ensure uniformity. At the local scale, the graph structure is leveraged for affinity-aware modeling via group discrimination. At the global scale, we introduce node deviation, a metric that distinguishes anomalies by optimizing representation centers. This unified approach enables robust and comprehensive detection of diverse graph anomalies.
Experiments on seven real datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and scalability.

Beyond Local Patterns: Multiscale Inconsistency Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection

In multi-view multi-label (MVML) classification, each sample is represented by multiple heterogeneous views and annotated with multiple labels. Existing methods typically exploit pairwise semantic relationships to mine intra-view correlations and align inter-view features for generating structural representations. However, these methods ignore the direct expression of high-order semantic similarities and alignments from a group perspective, which necessitates multi-step aggregation for subsequent feature fusion, leading to the inefficient and incomplete integration of key semantic information. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel hypergraph-based MVML method with Adaptive High-Order Semantic Fusion (HyperAHSF), which leverages hypergraphs to adaptively model group-level semantic similarities within each view and group-level semantic alignments across different views, enabling more effective feature fusion. Specifically, we first construct view-specific hyperedges by selecting multiple groups of node representations exhibiting high semantic similarity, which captures the group-level semantic similarities within each view, forming view-specific hypergraphs. Furthermore, we establish cross-view hyperedges to connect the multi-view node representations of each sample, which characterizes the group-level semantic alignments across different views, accordingly forming a unified multi-view hypergraph. Afterwards, we employ hypergraph neural networks to efficiently aggregate view-specific information and consensus information from their corresponding hypergraphs via group-level message passing. During the passing process, we impose a label-driven contrastive loss on the consensus information to encourage these representations to cluster toward their corresponding class prototypes, enhancing their discriminability. Finally, the consensus information together with the view-specific information is jointly integrated for multi-label classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperAHSF outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Hypergraph-Based Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Adaptive High-Order Semantic Fusion

Controllable diffusion models have shown great promise in visual generation by conditioning on diverse structural inputs, such as edges and depth. However, existing methods either require separate models for each control signal or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high computational cost when adapting to new conditions.
We introduce \textbf{DivControl}, a decomposable pre-training framework for unified and efficient conditional generation. By applying knowledge diversion to the condition encoder, DivControl explicitly disentangles condition-agnostic semantics (learngenes) from condition-specific modulations (tailors) via structured SVD-based decomposition. A dynamic soft routing mechanism selects relevant tailors based on semantic task embeddings, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel control types. To further enhance feature alignment, we incorporate a representation alignment loss that anchors early condition features to high-level semantic embeddings.
Extensive experiments on a 20-condition benchmark demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with \textbf{300$\times$ less training cost} than prior methods. It improves FID by \textbf{2.33} on seen conditions and shows strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen modalities, highlighting its scalability, modularity, and transferability in controllable diffusion.

DivControl: Knowledge Diversion for Controllable Image Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in long-context reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the \textbf{Generative Semantic Workspace} (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an \textit{Operator}, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a \textit{Reconciler}, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) \cite{huet_episodic_2025} comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to \textbf{20\%}. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by \textbf{51\%} compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons.

Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces

Neural networks have emerged as powerful surrogates for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), offering significant computational speedups over traditional methods. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: error accumulation during long-term rollouts, where small inaccuracies compound exponentially, eventually causing complete divergence from physically valid solutions. We present PhysicsCorrect, a training-free correction framework that enforces PDE consistency at each prediction step by formulating correction as a linearized inverse problem based on PDE residuals. Our key innovation is an efficient caching strategy that precomputes the Jacobian and its pseudoinverse during an offline warm-up phase, reducing computational overhead by two orders of magnitude compared to standard correction approaches. Across three representative PDE systems, including Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, wave equations, and the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, PhysicsCorrect reduces prediction errors by up to 100× while adding negligible inference time (under 5\%). The framework integrates seamlessly with diverse architectures, including Fourier Neural Operators, UNets, and Vision Transformers, effectively transforming unstable neural surrogates into reliable simulation tools that bridge the gap between deep learning's computational efficiency and the physical fidelity demanded by practical scientific applications.

PhysicsCorrect: A Training-Free Approach for Stable Neural PDE Simulations

Quickly and reliably finding accurate inverse kinematics
(IK) solutions is a challenging problem for many robot
manipulators. Existing numerical solvers are widely
applicable but typically only produce a single solution and
rely on local search techniques to minimize nonconvex
objectives. Recent learning-based approaches that
approximate the entire feasible set of solutions have shown
promise in generating multiple fast and accurate IK results
in parallel. However, existing learning-based techniques
have a significant drawback: each robot of interest
requires a specialized model that must be trained from
scratch. To address this key shortcoming, we propose a
novel distance-geometric robot representation coupled with
a graph structure that allows us to leverage the
generalizability of graph neural networks (GNNs). Our
approach, which we call generative graphical IK (GGIK), is
the first learned IK solver that is able to efficiently
yield a large number of diverse solutions in parallel while
also displaying the ability to generalize---a single
learned model can be used to produce IK solutions for a
variety of different robots. When compared to several other
learned IK methods, GGIK provides more accurate solutions
with the same amount of training data. GGIK can also
generalize reasonably well to robot manipulators unseen
during training. In addition, GGIK is able to learn a
constrained distribution that encodes joint limits and
scales well with the number of robot joints and sampled
solutions. Finally, GGIK can be used to complement local IK
solvers by providing a reliable initialization for the
local optimization process.

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