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Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) refers to the system that produces answers to user queries by reasoning with a large-scale structured knowledge base. Advanced works have achieved great success either by generating logical forms (LFs) or directly generating answers. Although the former typically yields better performance, these generated LFs could be inaccurate, e.g., non-executable. In this regard, large language models (LLMs) have shown exciting potential for accurate generation. However, it is challenging to fine-tune an LLMs to generate LFs. This is because the context retrieved for prediction typically leads to an excessive number of reasoning paths. In this context, LLMs can generate numerous LFs corresponding to these reasoning paths, but a few LFs can result in correct answers. Thus, fine-tuning LLMs to generate answer-relevant LFs would conflict with LLMs&#39; prior knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel learning framework, FM-KBQA, to \emph{f}ine-tune LLMs using \emph{m}ulti-task learning for \emph{KBQA}. Specifically, we propose to fine-tune LLMs using an additional objective: generating the index of reasoning paths that lead to correct answers. This will direct LLMs to pay attention to answer-relevant paths among numerous reasoning paths by completing a simple task where the selected reasoning paths can be supplementary for non-executable LFs. Directly generating answers can make LLMs pay attention to the answer-relevant reasoning paths, but it is much more challenging than generating the index of reasoning paths. To verify FM-KBQA&#39;s effectiveness, we conduct experiments on mainstream benchmarks, such as WebQuestionsSP (WQSP) and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ). Extensive evaluations across two public benchmark datasets underscore the superiority of FM-KBQA over current state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI 2025

Promoting Knowledge Base Question Answering by Directing LLMs to Generate Task-relevant Logical Forms

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) refers to the system that produces answers to user queries by reasoning with a large-scale structured knowledge base. Advanced works have achieved great success either by generating logical forms (LFs) or directly generating answers. Although the former typically yields better performance, these generated LFs could be inaccurate, e.g., non-executable. In this regard, large language models (LLMs) have shown exciting potential for accurate generation. However, it is challenging to fine-tune an LLMs to generate LFs. This is because the context retrieved for prediction typically leads to an excessive number of reasoning paths. In this context, LLMs can generate numerous LFs corresponding to these reasoning paths, but a few LFs can result in correct answers. Thus, fine-tuning LLMs to generate answer-relevant LFs would conflict with LLMs' prior knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel learning framework, FM-KBQA, to \emph{f}ine-tune LLMs using \emph{m}ulti-task learning for \emph{KBQA}. Specifically, we propose to fine-tune LLMs using an additional objective: generating the index of reasoning paths that lead to correct answers. This will direct LLMs to pay attention to answer-relevant paths among numerous reasoning paths by completing a simple task where the selected reasoning paths can be supplementary for non-executable LFs. Directly generating answers can make LLMs pay attention to the answer-relevant reasoning paths, but it is much more challenging than generating the index of reasoning paths. To verify FM-KBQA's effectiveness, we conduct experiments on mainstream benchmarks, such as WebQuestionsSP (WQSP) and ComplexWebQuestions (CWQ). Extensive evaluations across two public benchmark datasets underscore the superiority of FM-KBQA over current state-of-the-art methods.

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

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-25 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.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/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. AAAI-25 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.



The scarcity data of medical field brings the collaborative training in medical vision-language pre-training (VLP) cross different clients. Therefore, the collaborative training in medical VLP faces two challenges: First, the medical data requires privacy, thus can not directly shared across different clients. Second, medical data distribution across institutes is typically heterogeneous, hindering local model align-
ment and representation capabilities. To simultaneously overcome these two challenges, we propose the framework called personalized model selector with fused multimodal information (PMS-FM). The contribution of PMS-FM is two-fold: 1) PMS-FM uses embeddings to represent information in different formats, allowing for the fusion of multimodal data. 2) PMS-FM adapts to personalized data distributions by training multiple models. A model selector then identifies and selects the best-performing model for each individual client. Extensive experiments with multiple real-world medical datasets demonstrate the superb performance of PMS-FM over existing federated learning methods on different zero-shot classification tasks. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/addadw212/-PMS-FM

Overcoming Heterogeneous Data in Federated Medical Vision-Language Pre-training: A Triple-Embedding Model Selector Approach

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) strives to accurately pinpoint event timestamps in a specific video using linguistic queries, significantly impacting downstream tasks like video browsing and editing. Unlike traditional task-specific models, Video Large Language Models (video LLMs) can handle multiple tasks concurrently in a zero-shot manner. Consequently, exploring the application of video LLMs for VTG tasks has become a burgeoning research area.
However, despite considerable advancements in video content understanding, video LLMs often struggle to accurately pinpoint timestamps within videos, limiting their effectiveness in VTG tasks. To address this, we introduce VTG-LLM, a model designed to enhance video LLMs' timestamp localization abilities. Our approach includes: (1) effectively integrating timestamp knowledge into visual tokens; (2) incorporating absolute-time tokens to manage timestamp knowledge without concept shifts; and (3) introducing a lightweight, high-performance, slot-based token compression technique designed to accommodate the demands of a large number of frames to be sampled for VTG tasks.
Additionally, we present VTG-IT-120K, a collection of publicly available VTG datasets that we have re-annotated to improve upon low-quality annotations.
Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of VTG-LLM in comparison to other video LLM methods across a variety of VTG tasks.

VTG-LLM: Integrating Timestamp Knowledge into Video LLMs for Enhanced Video Temporal Grounding

Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently gained great success in the field of object detection. By transferring the knowledge of spatial
or channel domain form the teacher model to the student model, it allows for more compact representation with minimal performance loss. Despite this progress, existing KD methods typically treat the knowledge from spatial or channel domains independently, ignoring the exploitation of the mutual relationship between these domains. In this work, we first explore the connection between spatial and channel domains, and find there exists a strong correlation between them, i.e., the salient channels tend to contain significant object regions in the spatial domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose DCSF-KD, a novel Dynamic Channel-wise Spatial Feature Knowledge Distillation, a novel Dual-Domain knowledge distillation framework for object detection by fully exploiting both spatial and channel knowledge. Specifically, We introduce channel-wise spatial feature distillation and global channel attention distillation, leveraging information from both domains to boost the accuracy of the student network. Experiments demonstrates that our DDKD outperforms existing detection methods on both homogeneous and heterogeneous teacher-student network pairs. For example, when using the MaskRCNN-Swin detector as the teacher, and basing on RetinaNet and FCOS with ResNet-50 on COCO2017, our DDKD can achieve 41.9% and 44.1% 𝑚𝐴𝑃, respectively. Code would be available after review.

DCSF-KD: Dynamic Channel-wise Spatial Feature Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection

Existing Transformer-based RGBT trackers achieve remarkable performance benefits by leveraging self-attention to extract uni-modal features and cross-attention to enhance multi-modal feature interaction and search-template correlation. Nevertheless, the independent search-template correlation calculations are prone to be affected by low-quality data, which might result in contradictory and ambiguous correlation weights. It not only limits the intra-modal feature representation, but also harms the robustness of cross-attention for multi-modal feature interaction and search-template correlation computation. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach called Cross-modulated Attention Transformer (CAFormer), which innovatively integrates inter-modality interaction into the search-template correlation computation within typical attention mechanism, for RGBT tracking. In particular, we first independently generate correlation maps for each modality and feed them into the designed correlation modulated enhancement module, which can modify inaccurate correlation weights by seeking the consensus between modalities. Such kind of design unifies self-attention and cross-attention schemes, which not only alleviates inaccurate attention weight computation in self-attention but also eliminates redundant computation introduced by extra cross-attention scheme. In addition, we design a collaborative token elimination strategy to further improve tracking inference efficiency and accuracy. Extensive experiments on five public RGBT tracking benchmarks show the outstanding performance of the proposed CAFormer against state-of-the-art methods. We will release the code upon acceptance.

Cross-modulated Attention Transformer for RGBT Tracking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and have been applied across various scientific fields, including chemistry. However, many chemical tasks require the processing of visual information, which cannot be successfully handled by existing chemical LLMs. This brings a growing need for models capable of integrating multimodal information in the chemical domain. In this paper, we introduce ChemVLM, an open-source chemical multimodal large language model specifically designed for chemical applications. ChemVLM is trained on a carefully curated bilingual multimodal dataset that enhances its ability to understand both textual and visual chemical information, including molecular structures, reactions, and chemistry examination questions. We develop three datasets for comprehensive evaluation, tailored to Chemical Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Multimodal Chemical Reasoning (MMCR), and Multimodal Molecule Understanding tasks. We benchmark ChemVLM against a range of open-source and proprietary multimodal large language models on various tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ChemVLM achieves competitive performance across all evaluated tasks.

ChemVLM: Exploring the Power of Multimodal Large Language Models in Chemistry Area

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been playing a dominant role in computer vision. However, the existing approaches of using local window modeling in popular CNNs lack flexibility and hinder their ability to capture long-range dependencies of objects in an image. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel CNN architecture, termed  Dynamic Clustering Convolutional Neural Network (DCCNeXt). The proposed DCCNeXt takes a unique approach by employing global clustering to group image patches with similar semantics into clusters that are then convolved using the shared convolution kernels. To address the high computational complexity of global clustering,  the feature vectors from each patch's subspace are extracted for efficient clustering, which makes the proposed model widely compatible with the downstream vision tasks. The extensive experiments of image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed  DCCNeXt outperforms the mainstream Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), Vision Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs), Vision Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Vision Mambas. We anticipate that this study will provide a new perspective and a promising avenue for the design of convolutional neural networks.

Dynamic Clustering Convolutional Neural Network

Mathematical reasoning ability objectively reflects a language model's understanding of implicit knowledge in contexts, with logic being a prerequisite for exploring, articulating and establishing effective reasoning. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in complex reasoning tasks represented by mathematical reasoning. However, existing mathematical datasets either focus on commonsense reasoning, assessing the model's knowledge application ability, or arithmetic problems with fixed calculation rules, evaluating the model's rapid learning capability. There is a lack of datasets that require solving problems solely through logical reasoning. As a result, the performance of LLMs in accurately understanding the implicit logical relationships in problems and deriving conclusions based solely on given conditions is hindered. To address this challenge, we construct a dataset specifically for multiple step reasoning tasks: Reasoning-Math (RMath). This dataset focuses on evaluating logical reasoning abilities with mathematical reasoning problems, covering typical problem types, including direct reasoning problems, hypothetical reasoning problems, and nested reasoning problems. Additionally, we design a standardized annotation scheme that transforms natural language descriptions of conditions into formal propositions. Other annotation contents include problem categories, proposition truth values, and proposition relationship types. This not only reduces biases caused by semantic misunderstandings during problem-solving, but also facilitates the incorporation of theoretically grounded logical reasoning methods to enhance reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we propose a normalization problem-solving framework based on propositional logic for RMath and design the problem-solving process for prompt tuning to guide LLMs to absorb mathematical logical theories and improving reasoning abilities. Finally, we evaluate RMath on several popular LLMs and present the corresponding results.

RMath: A Logic Reasoning-Focused Datasets Toward Mathematical Multistep Reasoning Tasks

This paper incorporates the efficiency of automatic summarization and addresses the challenge of generating personalized summaries tailored to individual users' interests and requirements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce SummPilot, an interaction-based customizable summarization system. SummPilot leverages a large language model to facilitate both automatic and interactive summarization. Users can engage with the system to understand document content and personalize summaries through interactive components such as semantic graphs, entity clustering, and explainable evaluation. Our demo and user studies demonstrate SummPilot's adaptability and usefulness for customizable summarization.

SummPilot: Bridging Efficiency and Customization for Interactive Summarization System

We present QGen Studio: an adaptive question-answer generation, training, and evaluation platform. QGen Studio enables users to leverage large language models (LLMs) to create custom question-answer datasets and fine-tune models on this synthetic data. It features a dataset viewer and model explorer to streamline this process. The dataset viewer provides key metrics and visualizes the context from which the QA pairs are generated, offering insights into data quality. The model explorer supports model comparison, allowing users to contrast the performance of their trained LLMs against other models, supporting performance benchmarking and refinement. QGen Studio delivers an interactive, end-to-end solution for generating QA datasets and training scalable, domain-adaptable models. The studio will be open-sourced soon, allowing users to deploy it locally.

QGen Studio: An Adaptive Question-Answer Generation, Training and Evaluation Platform

Recent development in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved superior performance and generalization capabilities, covered extensive areas of traditional tasks. However, existing large model training frameworks support only a limited number of models and techniques, particularly lacking in support for new models, which makes fine-tuning LLMs challenging for most developers. Therefore, we develop SWIFT, a customizable one-stop infrastructure for large models. With support of over 350+ LLMs and 80+ MLLMs, SWIFT stands as the open-source framework that provide the most comprehensive support for fine-tuning large models. In particular, it is the first training framework that provides systematic support for MLLMs. Moreover, SWIFT integrates post-training processes such as inference, evaluation, and quantization, to facilitate fast adoptions of large models in various application scenarios, offering helpful utilities like benchmark comparisons among different training techniques.

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Overcoming Heterogeneous Data in Federated Medical Vision-Language Pre-training: A Triple-Embedding Model Selector Approach

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Generating then Refining for Reliable Knowledge Base Question Answering