Singapore

As vision-language models (VLMs) tackle increasingly complex and multimodal tasks, the rapid growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes significant memory and computational bottlenecks during inference. While Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) offers an effective means to compress the KV cache and accelerate inference, adapting existing VLMs to the MLA architecture without costly pretraining remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present \textbf{MHA2MLA-VLM}, a parameter-efficient and multimodal-aware framework for converting off-the-shelf VLMs to MLA. 
Our approach features two core techniques: (1) a modality-adaptive partial-RoPE strategy that supports both traditional and multimodal settings by selectively masking nonessential dimensions, and (2) a modality-decoupled low-rank approximation method that independently compresses the visual and textual KV spaces. Furthermore, we introduce parameter-efficient fine-tuning to minimize adaptation cost and demonstrate that minimizing output activation error, rather than parameter distance, substantially reduces performance loss. Extensive experiments on three representative VLMs show that MHA2MLA-VLM restores original model performance with minimal supervised data, significantly reduces KV cache footprint, and integrates seamlessly with KV quantization.

AAAI 2026

MHA2MLA-VLM: Enabling DeepSeek’s Economical Multi-Head Latent Attention Across Vision-Language Models

architecture migration

language grounding & multi-modal nlp

vision-language models

efficient inference

attention mechanisms

### 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.

Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) provide a principled framework for modeling asynchronous event sequences by conditioning on the history of past events. However, most existing MTPP models rely on channel-mixing strategies that encode information from different event types into a single, fixed-size latent representation. This entanglement can obscure type-specific dynamics, leading to performance degradation and increased risk of overfitting. In this work, we introduce ITPP, a novel channel-independent architecture for MTPP modeling that decouples event type information using an encoder-decoder framework with an ODE-based backbone. Central to ITPP is a type-aware inverted self-attention mechanism, designed to explicitly model inter-channel correlations among heterogeneous event types. This architecture enhances effectiveness and robustness while reducing overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that ITPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MTPP models in both predictive accuracy and generalization.

ITPP: Learning Disentangled Event Dynamics in Marked Temporal Point Processes

3D semantic occupancy prediction offers a nuanced representation of the surrounding environment, which is crucial for ensuring the safety of autonomous driving. However, fine-grained scene representations inevitably result in cubic growth in data scale, which imposes substantial demands on model architecture and computational complexity, especially in high-resolution scenarios. Existing approaches for handling high-resolution scenes typically obtain fine-grained features by grid sampling on low-resolution feature map, resulting in limited sparsity and insufficient feature interaction. This paper presents a framework leveraging SParse representation and SCalable feature interaction to address the aforementioned challenges, called SPSC. Specifically, we maintain sparsity by progressively pruning unoccupied queries during the coarse-to-fine process, thereby reducing the scale of data that the model needs to handle. Subsequently, we introduce query serialization, which transforms queries into an ordered sequence while preserving their spatial structure, This enables fine-grained feature interaction while maintaining linear computational complexity and a larger receptive field. Without complex architectural designs, SPSC significantly outperforms SOTA approaches, relatively enhances the mIoU by 12.0%, 11.0% and 4.8% on nuScenes-Occupancy dataset under the muli-modal, LiDAR and camera settings, respectively.

SPSC: Sparse and Scalable Multi-Modal 3D Occupancy Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Existing gaze estimation models often struggle to generalize to unseen users, primarily due to significant variations in individual appearance. Empirical observations reveal that performance improves when the visual appearance of test subjects closely resembles that of training subjects. Motivated by this, we propose a generalizable gaze estimation framework MoEGaze based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. During training, the model extracts appearance features from facial images and uses them to route samples to specialized gaze expert networks, each tailored to a specific subset of appearances. Rather than directly predicting gaze, each expert outputs intermediate gaze features, which are dynamically aggregated according to the input appearance and then mapped to gaze prediction. This dynamic routing design enables the model to effectively adapt to users with diverse appearances, while also facilitating easier training on sub-datasets with smaller appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior cross-domain performance compared to existing approaches, with an average improvement of 27.6% across four cross-domain
metrics over the baseline. Furthermore, MoEGaze surpasses baselines trained on the full dataset while requiring only 10% of the training data.

MoEGaze: A Mixture of Experts Approach for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

Synthetic data is widely adopted in embedding models to ensure diversity in training data distributions across dimensions such as difficulty, length, and language. However, existing prompt-based synthesis methods struggle to capture domain-specific data distributions, particularly in data-scarce domains, and often overlook fine-grained relevance diversity. In this paper, we present a Chinese short video dataset with 4-level relevance annotations, filling a critical resource void. Further, we propose a semi-supervised synthetic data pipeline where two collaboratively trained models generate domain-adaptive short video data with controllable relevance labels. Our method enhances relevance-level diversity by synthesizing samples for underrepresented intermediate relevance labels, resulting in a more balanced and semantically rich training data set.
Extensive offline experiments show that the embedding model trained on our synthesized data outperforms those using data generated based on prompting or vanilla supervised fine-tuning(SFT). Moreover, we demonstrate that incorporating more diverse fine-grained relevance levels in training data enhances the model's sensitivity to subtle semantic distinctions, highlighting the value of fine-grained relevance supervision in embedding learning. In the search enhanced recommendation pipeline of a major Chinese short video platform's dual-column scenario, through online A/B testing, the proposed model increased click-through rate(CTR) by 1.45\%, raised the proportion of Strong Relevance Ratio (SRR) by 4.9\%, and improved the Image User Penetration Rate (IUPR) by 0.1054\%.

Semi-Supervised Synthetic Data Generation with Fine-Grained Relevance Control for Short Video Search Relevance Modeling

Identical twin face verification represents an extreme fine-grained recognition challenge where even state-of-the-art systems fail due to overwhelming genetic similarity. Current face recognition methods achieve over 99.8\% accuracy on standard benchmarks but drop dramatically to 88.9\% when distinguishing identical twins, exposing critical vulnerabilities in biometric security systems. The difficulty lies in learning features that capture subtle, non-genetic variations that uniquely identify individuals. We propose the Asymmetric Hierarchical Attention Network (AHAN), a novel architecture specifically designed for this challenge through multi-granularity facial analysis. AHAN introduces a Hierarchical Cross-Attention (HCA) module that performs multi-scale analysis on semantic facial regions, enabling specialized processing at optimal resolutions. We further propose a Facial Asymmetry Attention Module (FAAM) that learns unique biometric signatures by computing cross-attention between left and right facial halves, capturing subtle asymmetric patterns that differ even between twins. To ensure the network learns truly individuating features, we introduce Twin-Aware Pair-Wise Cross-Attention (TA-PWCA), a training-only regularization strategy that uses each subject's own twin as the hardest possible distractor. Extensive experiments on the ND\_TWIN dataset demonstrate that AHAN achieves 92.3\% verification accuracy, representing a 3.4\% improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

AHAN: Asymmetric Hierarchical Attention Network for Identical Twin Face Verification

High-resolution computed tomography (CT) is essential for diagnosing hearing loss and planning interventions such as cochlear implantation, as it provides detailed visualization of inner-ear anatomy. This paper focuses on advancing AI-based analysis of inner-ear CT scans to support clinical decision-making. However, a major challenge lies in the scarcity of annotated data, which limits the applicability of conventional supervised learning techniques. To address this, we present the first publicly available Children's Inner Ear CT Dataset (CIED), comprising 722 CT scans labeled for structural anomaly detection, postoperative hearing outcome prediction, and anatomical segmentation. In addition, we explore the use of medical foundation models to improve generalization in data-scarce scenarios. Existing parameter-efficient adaptation methods often fall short in two ways: they lack a unified mechanism to adapt across diverse foundation model architectures and they are not specifically designed to incorporate domain expert knowledge of inner-ear anatomy and pathology. To overcome these limitations, we propose Domain Knowledge Guided Tuning (DKGT), a plug-and-play framework that introduces a unified adapter—Domain Knowledge Aggregator (DKA)—to inject radiomics-based anatomical features into foundation models via cross-attention. DKA supports various backbone types and preserves pretrained representations of foundation model while enabling multi-layer integration of expert knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that DKGT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art classification methods, achieving superior performance and generalizability on inner-ear CT analysis.

Tuning Medical Foundation Models for Inner Ear Temporal CT Analysis with Plug-and-play Domain Knowledge Aggregator

Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained, post-deployment controllability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified co-training framework that efficiently integrates multiple safety behaviors: positive (lawful/prosocial), negative (unfiltered/risk-prone) and rejective (refusal-oriented/conservative) within a single SFT stage. Notably, each behavior is dynamically activated via a simple system-level instruction, or magic token, enabling stealthy and efficient behavioral switching at inference time. This flexibility supports diverse deployment scenarios, such as positive for safe user interaction, negative for internal red-teaming, and rejective for context-aware refusals triggered by upstream moderation signals. This co-training strategy induces a distinct Safety Alignment Margin in the output space, characterized by well-separated response distributions corresponding to each safety mode. The existence of this margin provides empirical evidence for the model's safety robustness and enables unprecedented fine-grained control. Experiments show that our method matches the safety alignment quality of SFT+DPO, with our 8B model notably surpassing DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in safety performance, while significantly reducing both training complexity and deployment costs. This work presents a scalable, efficient, and highly controllable solution for LLM content safety.

Efficient Switchable Safety Control in LLMs via Magic-Token-Guided Co-Training

Intelligent agents in real-world applications must adapt their behavior to changing contexts and user preferences. For example, planning a road trip requires considering both travel time and cost. Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) provides a principled approach to navigate such trade-offs. However, most existing approaches require predefined preference weights during training and jointly optimize the model for all objectives. In this paper, we introduce TORA (Train Once, Realign Anytime), a novel framework that defers preference integration to inference time, enabling flexible adaptation to user preferences without retraining. TORA independently trains diffusion planning models for each objective and combines them at inference time using user-specified preferences to generate behavior aligned with desired trade-offs. Furthermore, new objectives can be added seamlessly by training additional models without modifying existing ones. Empirical evaluations on standard offline MORL benchmarks demonstrate that TORA achieves competitive and consistent performance compared to methods that require fixed preference weights.

TORA: Train Once, Realign Anytime for Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Alignment methods in moral domains seek to elicit moral preferences of human stakeholders and incorporate them into AI. This presupposes moral preferences as static targets, but such preferences often evolve over time. Proper alignment of AI to dynamic human preferences should ideally account for "legitimate" changes to moral reasoning, while ignoring changes related to attention deficits, cognitive biases, or other arbitrary factors. However, common AI alignment approaches largely neglect temporal changes in preferences, posing serious challenges to proper alignment, especially in high-stakes applications of AI, e.g., in healthcare domains, where misalignment can jeopardize the trustworthiness of the system and yield serious individual and societal harms. This work investigates the extent to which people’s moral preferences change over time, and the impact of such changes on AI alignment. Our study is grounded in the kidney allocation domain, where we elicit responses to pairwise comparisons of hypothetical kidney transplant patients from over 400 participants across 3-5 days. We find that, on average, participants change their response to the same scenario presented at different times around 6--20% of the time (exhibiting "response instability"). Additionally, we observe significant shifts in several participants’ retrofitted decision-making models over time (capturing "model instability"). The predictive performance of simple AI models decreases as a function of both response and model instability. Moreover, predictive performance diminishes over time, highlighting the importance of accounting for temporal changes in preferences during training. These findings raise fundamental normative and technical challenges relevant to AI alignment, highlighting the need to better understand the object of alignment (what to align to) when user preferences change significantly over time, including the different mechanisms underlying this change.

Moral Change or Noise? On Problems of Aligning AI with Temporally Unstable Human Feedback

Large language models are increasingly influencing human moral decisions, yet current approaches focus primarily on evaluating rather than actively steering their moral decisions. 
We formulate this as an out-of-distribution moral alignment problem, where LLM agents must learn to apply consistent moral reasoning frameworks to scenarios beyond their training distribution. 
We introduce Moral-Reason-QA, a novel dataset extending 680 human-annotated, high-ambiguity moral scenarios with framework-specific reasoning traces across utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, enabling systematic evaluation of moral generalization in realistic decision contexts.
Our learning approach employs Group Relative Policy Optimization with composite rewards that simultaneously optimize decision alignment and framework-specific reasoning processes to facilitate learning of the underlying moral frameworks. 
Experimental results demonstrate successful generalization to unseen moral scenarios, with softmax-normalized alignment scores improving by +0.757 for utilitarian and +0.450 for deontological frameworks when tested on out-of-distribution evaluation sets. 
The experiments also reveal training challenges and promising directions that inform future research.
These findings establish that LLM agents can be systematically trained to internalize and apply specific moral frameworks to novel situations, providing a critical foundation for AI safety as language models become more integrated into human decision-making processes.
Code and data will be open-sourced.

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