United States

Event sequence, where each event is associated with a marker and a timestamp, is increasingly ubiquitous in various applications. Accordingly, event forecasting emerges to be a crucial problem, which aims to predict the next event based on the historical sequence. 
In this paper, we propose ANPP, an Attentive Neural Point Processes framework to solve this problem. In comparison with state-of-the-art methods like recurrent marked temporal point processes,
ANPP leverages the time-aware self-attention mechanism to explicitly model the influence between every pair of historical events, resulting in more accurate predictions of events and better interpretation ability.
Extensive experiments on one synthetic and four real-world datasets demonstrate that ANPP can achieve significant performance gains against state-of-the-art methods for predictions of both timings and markers.
To facilitate future research, we release the codes and datasets at https://github.com/guyulongcs/AAAI2021\_ANPP.

AAAI 2021

Attentive Neural Point Processes for Event Forecasting

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Deep learning models have been applied to many healthcare tasks based on electronic medical records (EMR) data and shown substantial performance. Existing methods commonly embed the records of a single patient into a representation for medical tasks. Such methods learn inadequate representations and lead to inferior performance, especially when the patientâ€™s data is sparse or low-quality. Aiming at the above problem, we propose GRASP, a generic framework for healthcare models. For a given patient, GRASP first finds patients in the dataset who have similar conditions and similar results (i.e., the similar patients), and then enhances the representation learning and prognosis of the given patient by leveraging knowledge extracted from these similar patients. GRASP defines similarities with different meanings between patients for different clinical tasks, and finds similar patients with useful information accordingly, and then learns cohort representation to extract valuable knowledge contained in the similar patients. The cohort information is fused with the current patientâ€™s representation to conduct final clinical tasks. Experimental evaluations on two real-world datasets show that GRASP can be seamlessly integrated into state-of-the-art models with consistent performance improvements. Besides, under the guidance of medical experts, we verified the findings extracted by GRASP, and the findings are consistent with the existing medical knowledge, indicating that GRASP can generate useful insights for relevant predictions.

GRASP: Generic Framework for Health Status Representation Learning Based on Incorporating Knowledge from Similar Patients

Visual context provides grounding information for multimodal machine translation (MMT). However, previous MMT models and probing studies on visual features suggest that visual information is less explored in MMT as it is often redundant to textual information. In this paper, we propose an Object-level Visual Context modeling framework (OVC) to efficiently capture and explore visual information for multimodal machine translation. With detected objects, the proposed OVC encourages MMT to ground translation on desirable visual objects by masking irrelevant objects in the visual modality. We equip the proposed with an additional object-masking loss to achieve this goal. The object-masking loss is estimated according to the similarity between masked objects and the source texts so as to encourage masking source-irrelevant objects. Additionally, in order to generate vision-consistent target words, we further propose a vision-weighted translation loss for OVC. Experiments on MMT datasets demonstrate that the proposed OVC model outperforms state-of-the-art MMT models and analyses show that masking irrelevant objects helps grounding in MMT.

Efficient Object-Level Visual Context Modeling for Multimodal Machine Translation: Masking Irrelevant Objects Helps Grounding

Although deep neural networks have achieved amazing results on instance segmentation, they are still ill-equipped when they are required to learn new tasks incrementally. Concretely, they suffer from â€œcatastrophic forgettingâ€, an abrupt degradation of performance on old classes with the initial training data missing. Moreover, they are subjected to a negative transfer problem on new classes, which renders the model unable to update its knowledge while preserving the previous knowledge. To address these problems, we propose an incremental instance segmentation method that consists of three networks: Former Teacher Network (FTN), Current Student Network (CSN) and Current Teacher Network (CTN). Specifically, FTN supervises CSN to preserve the previous knowledge, and CTN supervises CSN to adapt to new classes. The supervision of two teacher networks is achieved by a distillation loss function for instances, bounding boxes, and classes. In addition, we adjust the supervision weights of different
teacher networks to balance between the knowledge preservation for former classes and the adaption to new classes. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL 2012 SBD and COCO datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Class-Incremental Instance Segmentation via Multi-Teacher Networks

Recent work introduced progressive network growing as a promising way to ease the training for large GANs, but the model design and architecture-growing strategy still remain under-explored and needs manual design for different image data. In this paper, we propose a method to dynamically grow a GAN during training, optimizing the network architecture and its parameters together with automation. The method embeds architecture search techniques as an interleaving step with gradient-based training to periodically seek the optimal architecture-growing strategy for the generator and discriminator. It enjoys the benefits of both eased training because of progressive growing and improved performance because of broader architecture design space. Experimental results demonstrate new state-of-the-art of image generation. Observations in the search procedure also provide constructive insights into the GAN model design such as generator-discriminator balance and convolutional layer choices.

Dynamically Grown Generative Adversarial Networks

Automatic few-shot font generation is a practical and widely studied problem because manual designs are expensive and sensitive to the expertise of designers. Existing few-shot font generation methods aim to learn to disentangle the style and content element from a few reference glyphs, and mainly focus on a universal style representation for each font style. However, such approach limits the model in representing diverse local styles, and thus makes it unsuitable to the most complicated letter system, e.g., Chinese, whose characters consist of a varying number of components (often called ``radical'') with a highly complex structure. In this paper, we propose a novel font generation method by learning localized styles, namely component-wise style representations, instead of universal styles. The proposed style representations enable us to synthesize complex local details in text designs. However, learning component-wise styles solely from reference glyphs is infeasible in the few-shot font generation scenario, when a target script has a large number of components, e.g., over 200 for Chinese. To reduce the number of reference glyphs, we simplify component-wise styles by a product of component factor and style factor, inspired by low-rank matrix factorization. Thanks to the combination of strong representation and a compact factorization strategy, our method shows remarkably better few-shot font generation results (with only 8 reference glyph images) than other state-of-the-arts, without utilizing strong locality supervision, e.g., location of each component, skeleton, or strokes. The source code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/lffont.

Few-Shot Font Generation with Localized Style Representations and Factorization

Recently, Transformer has been demonstrating promising performance in many NLP tasks and showing a trend of replacing Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Meanwhile, less attention is drawn to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) due to its weak ability in capturing sequential and long-distance dependencies, although it has excellent local feature extraction capability. In this paper, we introduce an Attentive Convolutional Transformer (ACT) that takes the advantages of both Transformer and CNN for efficient text classification. Specifically, we propose a novel attentive convolution mechanism that utilizes the semantic meaning of convolutional filters attentively to transform text from complex word space to a more informative convolutional filter space where important n-grams are captured. ACT is able to capture both local and global dependencies effectively while preserving sequential information. Experiments on various text classification tasks and detailed analyses show that ACT is a lightweight, fast, and effective universal text classifier, outperforming CNNs, RNNs, and attentive models including Transformer.

ACT: An Attentive Convolutional Transformer for Efficient Text Classification

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to recognize images belonging to unseen classes that are unavailable in the training
process, while Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) is a more realistic variant that both seen and unseen classes appear during testing. Most GZSL approaches achieve knowledge transfer based on the features of samples that inevitably contain information irrelevant to recognition, bringing negative influence for the performance. In this work, we propose a novel method, dubbed Disentangled-VAE, which aims to disentangle category-distilling factors and category-dispersing factors from visual as well as semantic features, respectively. In addition, a batch re-combining strategy on latent features is introduced to guide the disentanglement, encouraging the distilling latent features to be more discriminative for recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four challenging benchmark datasets

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning via Disentangled Representation

We study the streaming model for approximate matrix multiplication (AMM). We are interested in the scenario that the algorithm can only take one pass over the data with limited memory. The state-of-the-art deterministic sketching algorithm for streaming AMM is the co-occurring directions (COD), which has much smaller approximation errors than randomized algorithms and outperforms other deterministic sketching methods empirically. In this paper, we provide a tighter error bound for COD whose leading term considers the potential approximate low-rank structure and the correlation of input matrices.  We prove COD is space optimal with respect to our improved error bound. We also propose a variant of COD for sparse matrices with theoretical guarantees. The experiments on real-world sparse datasets show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than baseline methods.

Revisiting Co-Occurring Directions: Sharper Analysis and Efficient Algorithm for Sparse Matrices

Narrative Generation has attracted significant interest as a novel application of Automated Planning techniques. However, the vast amount of narrative material available opens the way to the use of Deep Learning techniques. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of narrative generation through self-supervised learning, using sequence embedding techniques or auto-encoders to produce narrative sequences. We use datasets of well-formed plots generated by a narrative planning approach, using pre-existing, published, narrative planning domains, to train generative models.
Our experiments demonstrate the ability of generative sequence models to produce narrative plots with similar structure to those obtained with planning techniques, but with significant plot novelty in comparison with the training set. Most importantly, generated plots share structural properties associated with narrative quality measures used in Planning-based methods. As plan-based structures account for a higher level of causality and narrative consistency, this suggests that our approach is able to extend a set of narratives with novel sequences that display the same high-level narrative properties.
Unlike methods developed to extend sets of textual narratives, ours operates at the level of plot structure. Thus, it has the potential to be used across various media for plots of significant complexity, being initially limited to training and generation operating in the same narrative genre.

Narrative Plan Generation with Self-Supervised Learning

Double Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm in Markov decision process (MDP) problems. Clipped Double Q-learning, as an effective variant of Double Q-learning, employs the clipped double estimator to approximate the maximum expected action value. Due to the underestimation bias of the clipped double estimator, performance of clipped Double Q-learning may be degraded in some stochastic environments. In this paper, in order to reduce the underestimation bias, we propose an action candidate based clipped double estimator for Double Q-learning. Specifically, we first select a set of elite action candidates with the high action values from one set of estimators. Then, among these candidates, we choose the highest valued action from the other set of estimators. Finally, we use the maximum value in the second set of estimators to clip the action value of the chosen action in the first set of estimators and the clipped value is used for approximating the maximum expected action value.  Theoretically, the underestimation bias in our clipped Double Q-learning decays monotonically as the number of the action candidates decreases.  Moreover, the number of action candidates controls the trade-off between the overestimation and underestimation biases. In addition, we also extend our clipped Double Q-learning to continuous action tasks via approximating the elite continuous action candidates. We empirically verify that our algorithm can more accurately estimate the maximum expected action value on some toy environments and yield good performance on several benchmark problems.

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