Canada

While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive instruction-following capabilities, it is still unclear whether and to what extent they can respond to explicit constraints that might be entailed in various instructions. As a significant aspect of LLM alignment, it is thus important to formulate such a specialized set of instructions as well as investigate the resulting behavior of LLMs. To address this vacancy, we propose a new benchmark CoDI-Eval to systematically and comprehensively evaluate LLMs&#39; responses to instructions with various constraints. We construct a large collection of constraints-attributed instructions as a test suite focused on both generalization and coverage. Specifically, we advocate an instruction diversification process to synthesize diverse forms of constraint expression and also deliberate the candidate task taxonomy with even finer-grained sub-categories. Finally, we automate the entire evaluation process to facilitate further developments. Different from existing studies on controllable text generation, CoDI-Eval extends the scope to the prevalent instruction-following paradigm for the first time. We provide extensive evaluations of representative LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Vicuna) on CoDI-Eval, revealing their limitations in following instructions with specific constraints and there is still a significant gap between open-source and commercial closed-source LLMs. We believe this benchmark will facilitate research into improving the controllability of LLMs&#39; responses to instructions. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Xt-cyh/CoDI-Eval.

AAAI 2024

Benchmarking Large Language Models on Controllable Generation under Diversified Instructions

(large) language models

evaluation of nlp models

generation

## 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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

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

While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive instruction-following capabilities, it is still unclear whether and to what extent they can respond to explicit constraints that might be entailed in various instructions. As a significant aspect of LLM alignment, it is thus important to formulate such a specialized set of instructions as well as investigate the resulting behavior of LLMs. To address this vacancy, we propose a new benchmark CoDI-Eval to systematically and comprehensively evaluate LLMs' responses to instructions with various constraints. We construct a large collection of constraints-attributed instructions as a test suite focused on both generalization and coverage. Specifically, we advocate an instruction diversification process to synthesize diverse forms of constraint expression and also deliberate the candidate task taxonomy with even finer-grained sub-categories. Finally, we automate the entire evaluation process to facilitate further developments. Different from existing studies on controllable text generation, CoDI-Eval extends the scope to the prevalent instruction-following paradigm for the first time. We provide extensive evaluations of representative LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Vicuna) on CoDI-Eval, revealing their limitations in following instructions with specific constraints and there is still a significant gap between open-source and commercial closed-source LLMs. We believe this benchmark will facilitate research into improving the controllability of LLMs' responses to instructions. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Xt-cyh/CoDI-Eval.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 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.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

Conventional super-resolution methods suffer from two drawbacks: substantial computational cost in upscaling an entire large image, and the introduction of extraneous or potentially detrimental information for downstream computer vision tasks during the refinement of the background. To solve these issues, we propose a novel transformer-based algorithm, Selective Super-Resolution (SSR), which partitions images into non-overlapping tiles, selects tiles of interest at various scales with a pyramid architecture, and exclusively reconstructs these selected tiles with deep features. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate the efficiency and robust performance of our approach for super-resolution. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the FID score is reduced from 26.78 to 10.41 with 40% reduction in computation cost for the BDD100K dataset.

Transformer-Based Selective Super-resolution for Efficient Image Refinement

This work proposes a robust 3D medical image fusion framework to establish a mutual-reinforcing mechanism between visual fusion and lesion segmentation, achieving their double improvement. Specifically, we explore the consistency between vision and semantics by sharing feature fusion modules. Through the coupled optimization of the visual fusion loss and the lesion segmentation loss, visual-related and semantic-related features will be pulled into the same domain, effectively promoting accuracy improvement in a mutual-reinforcing manner. Further, we establish the robustness guarantees by constructing a two-level refinement constraint in the process of feature extraction and reconstruction. Benefiting from full consideration for the common degradation in medical images, our framework can not only provide clear visual fusion results for doctor's observation, but also enhance the defense ability of lesion segmentation against these negatives. Extensive evaluations of visual fusion and lesion segmentation scenarios demonstrate the advantages of our method in terms of accuracy and robustness. Moreover, our proposed framework is generic, which can be well-compatible with existing lesion segmentation algorithms and improve their performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HaoZhang1018/RMR-Fusion.

A Robust Mutual-Reinforcing Framework for 3D Multi-Modal Medical Image Fusion Based on Visual-Semantic Consistency

Vignetting commonly occurs as a degradation in images resulting from factors such as lens design, improper lens hood usage, and limitations in camera sensors. This degradation affects image details, color accuracy, and presents challenges in computational photography. Existing vignetting removal algorithms predominantly rely on ideal physics assumptions and hand-crafted parameters, resulting in ineffective removal of irregular vignetting and suboptimal results. Moreover, the substantial lack of real-world vignetting datasets hinders the objective and comprehensive evaluation of vignetting removal. To address these challenges, we present Vigset, a pioneering dataset for vignette removal. Vigset includes 983 pairs of both vignetting and vignetting-free high-resolution ($5340\times3697$) real-world images under various conditions. In addition, We introduce DeVigNet, a novel frequency-aware Transformer architecture designed for vignetting removal. Through the Laplacian Pyramid decomposition, we propose the Dual Aggregated Fusion Transformer to handle global features and remove vignetting in the low-frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce the Adaptive Channel Expansion Module to enhance details in the high-frequency domain. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Devignet: High-Resolution Vignetting Removal via a Dual Aggregated Fusion Transformer with Adaptive Channel Expansion

Pioneering efforts have verified the effectiveness of the diffusion models in exploring the informative uncertainty for recommendation. Considering the difference between recommendation and image synthesis tasks, existing methods have undertaken tailored refinements to the diffusion and reverse process. However, these approaches typically use the highest-score item in corpus for user interest prediction, leading to the ignorance of the user's generalized preference contained within other items, thereby remaining constrained by the data sparsity issue. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel Plug-in Diffusion Model for Recommendation (PDRec) framework, which employs the diffusion model as a flexible plugin to jointly take full advantage of the diffusion-generating user preferences on all items. Specifically, PDRec first infers the users' dynamic preferences on all items via a time-interval diffusion model and proposes a Historical Behavior Reweighting (HBR) mechanism to identify the high-quality behaviors and suppress noisy behaviors. In addition to the observed items, PDRec proposes a Diffusion-based Positive Augmentation (DPA) strategy to leverage the top-ranked unobserved items as the potential positive samples, bringing in informative and diverse soft signals to alleviate data sparsity. To alleviate the false negative sampling issue, PDRec employs Noise-free Negative Sampling (NNS) to select stable negative samples for ensuring effective model optimization. Extensive experiments and analyses on four datasets have verified the superiority of the proposed PDRec over the state-of-the-art baselines and showcased the universality of PDRec as a flexible plugin for commonly-used sequential encoders in different recommendation scenarios. The code is available in https://github.com/hulkima/PDRec.

Plug-In Diffusion Model for Sequential Recommendation

Novel-view synthesis with sparse input views is important for real-world applications like AR/VR and autonomous driving. Recent methods have integrated depth information into NeRFs for sparse input synthesis, leveraging depth prior for geometric and spatial understanding. However, most existing works tend to overlook inaccuracies within depth maps and have low time efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a depth-guided robust and fast point cloud fusion NeRF for sparse inputs. We perceive radiance fields as an explicit voxel grid of features. A point cloud is constructed for each input view, characterized within the voxel grid using matrices and vectors. We accumulate the point cloud of each input view to construct the fused point cloud of the entire scene. Each voxel determines its density and appearance by referring to the point cloud of the entire scene. Through point cloud fusion and voxel grid fine-tuning, inaccuracies in depth values are refined or substituted by those from other views. Moreover, our method can achieve faster reconstruction and greater compactness through effective vector-matrix decomposition. Experimental results underline the superior performance and time efficiency of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Depth-Guided Robust and Fast Point Cloud Fusion NeRF for Sparse Input Views

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD(λ), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction error into the historical context. However, this approach often neglects the significance of historical states and the relative importance of propagating the TD error, influenced by challenges such as visitation imbalance or outcome noise. To address this, we propose a novel TD algorithm named discerning TD learning (DTD), which allows flexible emphasis functions—predetermined or adapted during training—to allocate efforts effectively across states. We establish the convergence properties of our method within a specific class of emphasis functions and showcase its promising potential for adaptation to deep RL contexts. Empirical results underscore that employing a judicious emphasis function not only improves value estimation but also expedites learning across diverse scenarios.

Discerning Temporal Difference Learning

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) provides an effective solution for decision-making problems involving conflicting objectives. However, achieving high-quality approximations to the Pareto policy set remains challenging, especially in complex tasks with continuous or high-dimensional state-action space. In this paper, we propose the Pareto Ascent Directional Decomposition based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (PA2D-MORL) method, which constructs an efficient scheme for multi-objective problem decomposition and policy improvement, leading to a superior approximation of Pareto policy set. The proposed method leverages Pareto ascent direction to select the scalarization weights and computes the multi-objective policy gradient, which determines the policy optimization direction and ensures joint improvement on all objectives. Meanwhile, multiple policies are selectively optimized under an evolutionary framework to approximate the Pareto frontier from different directions. Additionally, a Pareto adaptive fine-tuning approach is applied to enhance the density and spread of the Pareto frontier approximation. Experiments on various multi-objective robot control tasks show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of both quality and stability of the outcomes.

PA2D-MORL: Pareto Ascent Directional Decomposition Based Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning | VIDEO

In this paper, we study the collaborative learning model, which concerns the tradeoff between parallelism and communication overhead in multi-agent multi-armed bandits.  For regret minimization in multi-armed bandits, we present the first set of tradeoffs between the number of rounds of communication between the agents and the regret of the collaborative learning process.

Communication-Efficient Collaborative Regret Minimization in Multi-Armed Bandits | VIDEO

Recent advances in event-based research prioritize sparsity and temporal precision. Approaches learning sparse point-based representations through graph CNNs (GCN) become more popular. Yet, these graph techniques hold lower performance than their frame-based counterpart due to two issues: (i) Biased graph structures that don't properly incorporate varied attributes (such as semantics, and spatial and temporal signals) for each vertex, resulting in inaccurate graph representations. (ii) A shortage of robust pretrained models. Here we solve the first problem by proposing a new event-based GCN (EDGCN), with a dynamic aggregation module to integrate all attributes of vertices adaptively. To address the second problem, we introduce a novel learning framework called cross-representation distillation (CRD), which leverages the dense representation of events as a cross-representation auxiliary to provide additional supervision and prior knowledge for the event graph. This frame-to-graph distillation allows us to benefit from the large-scale priors provided by CNNs while still retaining the advantages of graph-based models. Extensive experiments show our model and learning framework are effective and generalize well across multiple vision tasks.

A Dynamic GCN with Cross-Representation Distillation for Event-Based Learning | VIDEO

Online advertising has been one of the most important sources for industry's growth, where the demand-side platforms (DSP) play an important role via bidding to the ad exchanges on behalf of their advertiser clients. Since more and more ad exchanges have shifted from second to first price auctions, it is challenging for DSPs to adjust bidding strategy in the volatile environment. Recent studies on bid shading in first-price auctions may have limited performance due to relatively strong hypotheses about winning probability distribution. Moreover, these studies do not consider the incentive of advertiser clients, which can be crucial for a reliable advertising platform. In this work, we consider both the optimization of bid shading technique and the design of internal auction which is ex-post incentive compatible (IC) for the management of a DSP. Firstly, we prove that the joint design of bid shading and ex-post IC auction can be reduced to choosing one monotone bid function for each advertiser without loss of optimality. Then we propose a parameterized neural network to implement the monotone bid functions. With well-designed surrogate loss, the objective can be optimized in an end-to-end manner. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm.

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Transformer-Based Selective Super-resolution for Efficient Image Refinement

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