United States

We introduce the task of open-vocabulary visual instance search (OVIS). Given an arbitrary textual search query, Open-vocabulary Visual Instance Search (OVIS) aims to return a ranked list of visual instances, i.e., image patches, that satisfies the search intent from an image database. The term ``open vocabulary&#39;&#39; means that there are neither restrictions to the visual instance to be searched nor restrictions to the word that can be used to compose the textual search query. We propose to address such a search challenge via visual-semantic aligned representation learning (ViSA). ViSA leverages massive image-caption pairs as weak image-level (not instance-level) supervision to learn a rich cross-modal semantic space where the representations of visual instances (not images) and those of textual queries are aligned, thus allowing us to measure the similarities between any visual instance and an arbitrary textual query. To evaluate the performance of ViSA, we build two datasets named OVIS40 and OVIS1600 and also introduce a pipeline for error analysis. Through extensive experiments on the two datasets, we demonstrate ViSA&#39;s ability to search for visual instances in images not available during training given a wide range of textual queries including those composed of uncommon words. Experimental results show that ViSA achieves an mAP@50 of 27.8% on OVIS40 and achieves a recall@30 of 21.3% on OVIS1400 dataset under the most challenging settings.

AAAI 2022

OVIS: Open-Vocabulary Visual Instance Search via Visual-Semantic Aligned Representation Learning

### 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)

We introduce the task of open-vocabulary visual instance search (OVIS). Given an arbitrary textual search query, Open-vocabulary Visual Instance Search (OVIS) aims to return a ranked list of visual instances, i.e., image patches, that satisfies the search intent from an image database. The term ``open vocabulary'' means that there are neither restrictions to the visual instance to be searched nor restrictions to the word that can be used to compose the textual search query. We propose to address such a search challenge via visual-semantic aligned representation learning (ViSA). ViSA leverages massive image-caption pairs as weak image-level (not instance-level) supervision to learn a rich cross-modal semantic space where the representations of visual instances (not images) and those of textual queries are aligned, thus allowing us to measure the similarities between any visual instance and an arbitrary textual query. To evaluate the performance of ViSA, we build two datasets named OVIS40 and OVIS1600 and also introduce a pipeline for error analysis. Through extensive experiments on the two datasets, we demonstrate ViSA's ability to search for visual instances in images not available during training given a wide range of textual queries including those composed of uncommon words. Experimental results show that ViSA achieves an mAP@50 of 27.8% on OVIS40 and achieves a recall@30 of 21.3% on OVIS1400 dataset under the most challenging settings.

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. 

We consider the problem of learning action models for planning in unknown stochastic environments that can be defined using the Probabilistic Planning Domain Description Language (PPDDL). As input, we are given a set of previously executed trajectories, and the main challenge is to learn an action model that has a similar goal achievement probability to the policies used to create these trajectories. To this end, we introduce a variant of PPDDL in which there is uncertainty about the transition probabilities, specified by an interval for each factor that contains the respective true transition probabilities. Then, we present SAM+, an algorithm that learns such an imprecise-PPDDL environment model. SAM+ has a polynomial time and sample complexity, and guarantees that with high probability, the true environment is indeed captured by the defined intervals. We prove that the action model SAM+ outputs has a goal achievement probability that is almost as good or better than that of the policies used to produced the training trajectories. Then, we show how to produce a PPDDL model based on this imprecise-PPDDL model that has similar properties.

Learning Probably Approximately Complete and Safe Action Models for Stochastic Worlds

Active learning algorithms are effective in identifying the salient and exemplar samples from large amounts of unlabeled data. This tremendously reduces the human annotation effort in inducing a machine learning model as only a few samples, which are identified by the algorithm, need to be labeled manually. In problem domains like text mining and video classification, human oracles peruse the data instances incrementally to derive an opinion about their class labels (such as reading a movie review progressively to assess its sentiment). In such applications, it is not necessary for the human oracles to review an unlabeled sample end-to-end in order to provide a label; it may be more efficient to identify an optimal subinstance size (percentage of the sample from the start) for each unlabeled sample, and request the human annotator to label the sample by analyzing only the subinstance, instead of the whole data sample. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to address this challenging problem, in an effort to further reduce the labeling burden on the human oracles and utilize the available labeling budget more efficiently. We pose the sample and subinstance size selection as a constrained optimization problem and derive a linear programming relaxation to select a batch of exemplar samples, together with the optimal subinstance size of each, which can potentially augment maximal information to the underlying classification model. Our extensive empirical studies on six challenging datasets from the text mining domain corroborate the practical usefulness of our framework over competing baselines.

Active Sampling for Text Classification with Subinstance Level Queries

Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges, one of which is to teach the agent to speak guided by its value like a human. However, value-driven chatbots are still understudied in the area of dialogue systems. Most existing datasets focus on commonsense reasoning or social norm modeling. In this work, we present a new large-scale human value dataset called ValueNet, which contains human attitudes on 21,374 text scenarios. The dataset is organized in ten dimensions that conform to the basic human value theory in intercultural research. We further develop a Transformer-based value regression model on ValueNet to learn the utility distribution. Comprehensive empirical results show that the learned value model could benefit a wide range of dialogue tasks. For example, by teaching a generative agent with reinforcement learning and the rewards from the value model, our method attains state-of-the-art performance on the personalized dialog generation dataset: Persona-Chat. With values as additional features, existing emotion recognition models enable capturing rich human emotions in the context, which further improves the empathetic response generation performance in the EmpatheticDialogues dataset. To the best of our knowledge, ValueNet is the first large-scale text dataset for human value modeling, and we are the first one trying to incorporate a value model into emotionally intelligent dialogue systems. The dataset is available at https://liang-qiu.github.io/ValueNet/.

ValueNet: A New Dataset for Human Value Driven Dialogue System

Knowledge graph completion is the task of inferring missing facts based on existing data in a knowledge graph. Temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) is an extension of this task to temporal knowledge graphs, where each fact is additionally associated with a time stamp. Current approaches for TKGC primarily build on existing embedding models which are developed for static knowledge graph completion, and extend these models to incorporate time, where the idea is to learn latent representations for entities, relations, and timestamps and then use the learned representations to predict missing facts at various time steps. In this paper, we propose BoxTE, a box embedding model for TKGC, building on the static knowledge graph embedding model BoxE. We show that BoxTE is fully expressive, and possesses strong inductive capacity in the temporal setting. We then empirically evaluate our model and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on several TKGC benchmarks

Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion Using Box Embeddings

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is a technique to train a deep learning model to identify unseen classes using the attribute.
In this paper, we put forth a new GZSL technique that improves the GZSL classification performance greatly. 
Key idea of the proposed approach, henceforth referred to as semantic feature extraction-based GZSL (SE-GZSL), is to use the semantic feature containing only attribute-related information in learning the relationship between the image and the attribute. 
In doing so, we can remove the interference, if any, caused by the attribute-irrelevant information contained in the image feature. 
To train a network extracting the semantic feature, we present two novel loss functions, 1) mutual information-based loss to capture all the attribute-related information in the image feature and 2) similarity-based loss to remove unwanted attribute-irrelevant information. 
From extensive experiments using various datasets, we show that the proposed SE-GZSL technique outperforms conventional GZSL approaches by a large margin.

Semantic Feature Extraction for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods have found significant success by exploring essential properties of videos, e.g. speed, temporal order, etc.
This work exploits an essential yet under-explored property of videos, the \textit{video continuity}, to obtain supervision signals for self-supervised representation learning.
Specifically, we formulate three novel continuity-related pretext tasks, i.e. continuity justification, discontinuity localization, and missing section approximation, that jointly supervise a shared backbone for video representation learning. 
This self-supervision approach, termed as Continuity Perception Network (CPNet), solves the three tasks altogether and encourages the backbone network to learn local and long-ranged motion and context representations. It outperforms prior arts on multiple downstream tasks, such as action recognition, video retrieval, and action localization.
Additionally, the video continuity can be complementary to other coarse-grained video properties for representation learning, and integrating the proposed pretext task to prior arts can yield much performance gains.

Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Representation Learning by Exploiting Video Continuity

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of finding collision-free paths for multiple agents that minimize the sum of path costs. EECBS is a leading two-level algorithm that solves MAPF bounded-suboptimally, that is, within some factor w of the minimum sum of path costs C*. It uses focal search to find bounded-suboptimal paths on the low level and  Explicit Estimation Search (EES) to resolve collisions on the high level. EES keeps track of a lower bound LB on C* to find paths whose sum of path costs is at most w LB in order to solve MAPF bounded-suboptimally. However, the costs of many paths are often much smaller than w times their minimum path costs, meaning that the sum of path costs is much smaller than w C*. In this paper, we therefore propose Flexible EECBS (FEECBS), which uses a flex(ible) distribution of the path costs (that relaxes the requirement to find bounded-suboptimal paths on the low level) in order to reduce the number of collisions that need to be resolved on the high level while still guaranteeing to solve MAPF bounded suboptimally. We address the drawbacks of flex distribution via techniques such as restrictions on the flex distribution, restarts of the high-level search with EECBS, and low-level focal-A* search. Our empirical evaluation shows that FEECBS substantially improves the efficiency of EECBS on MAPF instances with large maps and large numbers of agents.

Flex Distribution for Bounded-Suboptimal Multi-Agent Path Finding

Missing value imputation is crucial for real-world data science workflows. Imputation is harder in the online setting, as it requires the imputation method itself to be able to evolve over time. For practical applications, imputation algorithms should produce imputations that match the true data distribution, handle data of mixed types, including ordinal, boolean, and continuous variables, and scale to large datasets. In this work we develop a new online imputation algorithm for mixed data using the Gaussian copula. The online Gaussian copula model produces meets all the desiderata: its imputations match the data distribution even for mixed data, improve over its offline counterpart on the accuracy when the streaming data has a changing distribution, and on the speed (up to an order of magnitude) especially on large scale datasets. By fitting the copula model to online data, we also provide a new method to detect change points in the multivariate dependence structure for mixed data with missing values. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data validate the performance of the proposed methods.

Online Missing Value Imputation and Change Point Detection with the Gaussian Copula

Communication efficiency is crucial for federated learning (FL). Conducting local training steps in clients to reduce the communication frequency between clients and the server is a common method to address this issue. However, it leads to the client drift problem due to non-i.i.d. data distributions in different clients which severely deteriorates the performance. In this work, we propose a new method to improve the training performance in cross-silo FL via maintaining double momentum buffers. One momentum buffer tracks the server model updating direction, and the other tracks the local model updating direction. Moreover, we introduce a novel momentum fusion technique to coordinate the server and local momentum buffers. We also provide the first theoretical convergence analysis involving both the server and local standard momentum SGD. Extensive deep FL experimental results show a better training performance than FedAvg and existing standard momentum SGD variants.

Coordinating Momenta for Cross-Silo Federated Learning

We consider online resource allocation under a typical non-profit setting, where limited or even scarce resources are administered by a not-for-profit organization like a government. We focus on the internal-equity by assuming that arriving requesters are homogeneous in terms of their external factors like demands but heterogeneous for their internal attributes like demographics. Specifically, we associate each arriving requester with one or several groups based on their demographics (i.e., race, gender, and age), and we aim to design an equitable distributing strategy such that every group of requesters can receive a fair share of resources proportional to a preset target ratio. 
 We present two LP-based sampling algorithms and investigate them both theoretically (in terms of competitive-ratio analysis) and experimentally based on real COVID-19 vaccination data maintained by the Minnesota Department of Health. Both theoretical and numerical results show that our LP-based sampling strategies can effectively promote equity, especially when the arrival population is disproportionately represented, as observed in the early stage of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

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