Singapore

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&#39;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&#39;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\%.

AAAI 2026

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

nlp: other

nlp: applications

nlp: generation

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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\%.

poster

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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.

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.

MoralReason: Generalizable Moral Decision Alignment for LLM Agents Using Reasoning-Level Reinforcement Learning

Overestimation in evaluating large language models (LLMs) has become an increasing concern. Due to the contamination of public benchmarks or imbalanced model training, LLMs may achieve unreal evaluation results on public benchmarks, either intentionally or unintentionally, which leads to unfair comparisons among LLMs and undermines their realistic capability assessments. Existing benchmarks attempt to address these issues by keeping test cases permanently secret, mitigating contamination through human evaluation, or repeatedly collecting and constructing new samples. However, these approaches fail to ensure reproducibility, transparency, and high efficiency simultaneously. Moreover, the extent of overestimation in current LLMs remains unquantified. To address these issues, we propose ArxivRoll, a dynamic evaluation framework inspired by one-time pad encryption in cryptography. ArxivRoll comprises two key components: i) SCP (Sequencing, Cloze, and Prediction), an automated generator for private test cases, and ii) Rugged Scores (RS), metrics that measure the proportion of public benchmark contamination and training bias. Leveraging SCP, ArxivRoll constructs a new benchmark every six months using recent articles from ArXiv and employs them for one-time evaluations of LLM performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high quality of our benchmark, and we provide a systematic evaluation of current LLMs. The source code is available at https://github.com/liangzid/ArxivRoll/.

How Much Do Large Language Model Cheat on Evaluation? Benchmarking Overestimation Under the One-Time-Pad-Based Framework

The rapid advancement of text-to-image generative models has catalyzed widespread applications. However, persistent model biases continue to pose significant challenges to their ethical and effective deployment, often resulting in adverse outcomes across many use cases. Previous research has primarily addressed bias in narrowly defined scenarios, typically involving single-subject generation with limited contextual variability. Such simplified tasks fall short of serving as meaningful model evaluations in more complex real-world settings. For example, the prompt ``an assistant wearing a pink hat'' may reflect female-inclined biases associated with a pink hat. The neglected joint effects of the semantic binding in the prompts cause significant failures in current debiasing approaches. This work investigates **how bias manifests under semantic binding**, where contextual associations between objects and attributes influence generative outcomes. We demonstrate that the underlying bias distribution can be amplified based on these associations. To address this, we introduce a bias adherence score that quantifies how specific object-attribute bindings activate bias. Using this score, we develop a training-free context-bias control framework that decouples the underlying bias from the semantic bindings, improving over 10% biases in compositional generation tasks. Our analysis of bias scores across various attribute-object bindings and token decorrelation highlights a fundamental challenge: reducing bias without disrupting essential semantic relationships. These findings expose critical limitations in current debiasing approaches when applied to semantically bound contexts, underscoring the need to reassess prevailing bias mitigation strategies.

How Bias Binds: Measuring Hidden Associations for Bias Control in Text-to-Image Compositions

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction‑tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction tuned models—Gemma‑2-2B‑IT and LLaMA‑3.1-8B‑IT using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on residual‑stream activations. Given a harmful prompt, we search the SAE latent space for feature sets whose ablation flips the model from refusal to compliance, demonstrating causal influence and creating a jailbreak. Our search proceeds in three stages: 1. Refusal Direction - Finding a refusal mediating direction and collecting SAE features close to that direction, followed by 2. Greedy Filtering - to prune this set to obtain a minimal set and finally 3. Interaction Discovery - a factorization‑machine (FM) model that captures non‑linear interactions among the remaining active features and the minimal set. This pipeline yields a broad set of jailbreak-critical features, offering insight into the mechanistic basis of refusal. Moreover, we also find evidence of redundant features which remain dormant unless earlier features are suppressed. Our findings highlight the potential for fine-grained auditing and targeted intervention in safety behaviours by manipulating the interpretable latent space.

Beyond I’m Sorry, I Can’t: Dissecting Large-Language-Model Refusal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a powerful yet resource-intensive approach for post-training large language models (LLMs). Incorporating curriculum learning (CL) into RL has been shown to significantly improve training efficiency, particularly in reasoning tasks. However, existing CL methods face substantial challenges in multi-objective RL (MORL) settings, including: (1) difficulty in evaluating model capabilities online, (2) challenges in assessing sample importance under diverse objectives, and (3) inherent trade-offs between online training and offline inference in dynamically designing the curriculum. To address these issues, we propose a **M**ulti-**R**eward space guided **A**daptive **C**urriculum **L**earning framework (**MRACL**), which is the first to incorporate curriculum learning into multi-objective RL. MRACL first constructs a multi-dimensional reward space via offline inference to establish initial reward profiles for each training sample. During training, based on reward space, it estimates the evolving model capabilities by computing the centroid of the space and calculates the sample priority score through its capability distance, optimization direction and historical evolution, which enables adaptive selection of the most informative training samples at each step, independent of the specific RL algorithm. After each RL training iteration, the reward space is dynamically updated to reflect the model's evolving capabilities and the shifting distribution of sample priorities. Experiments on multi-objective alignment tasks demonstrate that MRACL achieves 1.62× faster convergence compared to state-of-the-art curriculum methods and 2.55× faster than non-curriculum methods. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms all baselines in both win rate and rule-based evaluation metrics. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the key factors contributing to MRACL's effectiveness, and summarize its advantages, applicable scenarios, and generalization across diverse experimental settings.

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