Canada

With growing concerns regarding bias and discrimination in predictive models, the AI community has increasingly focused on assessing AI system trustworthiness. Conventionally, trustworthy AI literature relies on the probabilistic framework and calibration as prerequisites for trustworthiness. In this work, we depart from this viewpoint by proposing a novel trust framework inspired by the philosophy literature on trust. We present a precise mathematical definition of trustworthiness, termed U-trustworthiness, specifically tailored for a subset of tasks aimed at maximizing a utility function. We argue that a model’s U-trustworthiness is contingent upon its ability to maximize Bayes utility within this task subset. Our first set of results challenges the probabilistic framework by demonstrating its potential to favor less trustworthy models and introduce the risk of misleading trustworthiness assessments. Within the context of U-trustworthiness, we prove that properly-ranked models are inherently U-trustworthy. Furthermore, we advocate for the adoption of the AUC metric as the preferred measure of trustworthiness. By offering both theoretical guarantees and experimental validation, AUC enables robust evaluation of trustworthiness, thereby enhancing model selection and hyperparameter tuning to yield more trustworthy outcomes.

AAAI 2024

U-trustworthy Models. Reliability, Competence, and Confidence in Decision-Making

peai: applications

ml: calibration & uncertainty quantification

robustness & trustworthiness

peai: safety

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. 
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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.

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. 

While convolution and self-attention are extensively used in learned image compression (LIC) for transform coding, this paper proposes an alternative called Contextual Clustering based LIC (CLIC) which primarily relies on clustering operations and local attention for correlation characterization and compact representation of an image. As seen, CLIC expands the receptive field into the entire image for intra-cluster feature aggregation. Afterward, features are reordered to their original spatial positions to pass through the local attention units for inter-cluster embedding. Additionally, we introduce the Guided Post-Quantization Filtering (GuidedPQF)  into CLIC, effectively mitigating the propagation and accumulation of quantization errors at the initial decoding stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of CLIC over state-of-the-art works: when optimized using MSE, it outperforms VVC by about 10% BD-Rate in three widely-used benchmark datasets; when optimized using MS-SSIM, it saves more than 50% BD-Rate over VVC. Our CLIC offers a new way to generate compact representations for image compression, which also provides a novel direction along the line of LIC development.

Another Way to the Top: Exploit Contextual Clustering in Learned Image Coding

Log anomaly detection is a key component in the field of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Considering log data of variant domains, retraining the whole network for unknown domains is inefficient in real industrial scenarios. However, previous deep models merely focused on extracting the semantics of log sequences in the same domain, leading to poor generalization on multi-domain logs. To alleviate this issue, we propose a unified Trans\textbf{former}-based framework for \textbf{Log} anomaly detection (LogFormer) to improve the generalization ability across different domains, where we establish a two-stage process including the pre-training and adapter-based tuning stage. Specifically, our model is first pre-trained on the source domain to obtain shared semantic knowledge of log data. Then, we transfer such knowledge to the target domain via shared parameters. Besides, the Log-Attention module is proposed to supplement the information ignored by the log-paring. The proposed method is evaluated on three public datasets and one real-world dataset. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our LogFormer  with fewer trainable parameters and lower training costs.

LogFormer: A Pre-train and Tuning Pipeline for Log Anomaly Detection

The combination of electronic health records (EHR) and medical images is crucial for clinicians in making diagnoses and forecasting prognoses. Strategically fusing these two data modalities has great potential to improve the accuracy of machine learning models in clinical prediction tasks. However, the asynchronous and complementary nature of EHR and medical images presents unique challenges. Missing modalities due to clinical and administrative factors are inevitable in practice, and the significance of each data modality varies depending on the patient and the prediction target, resulting in inconsistent predictions and suboptimal model performance. To address these challenges, we propose DrFuse to achieve effective clinical multi-modal fusion. It tackles the missing modality issue by disentangling the features shared across modalities and those unique within each modality. Furthermore, we address the modal inconsistency issue via a disease-wise attention layer that produces the patient- and disease-wise weighting for each modality to make the final prediction. We validate the proposed method using real-world large-scale datasets, MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

DrFuse: Learning Disentangled Representation for Clinical Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modality and Modal Inconsistency

We present a deep Graph Convolutional Kernel Machine (GCKM) for semi-supervised node classification in graphs. The method is built of two main types of blocks: (i) We introduce unsupervised kernel machine layers propagating the node features in a one-hop neighborhood, using implicit node feature mappings. (ii) We specify a semi-supervised classification kernel machine through the lens of the Fenchel-Young inequality. We derive an effective initialization scheme and efficient end-to-end training algorithm in the dual variables for the full architecture. The main idea underlying GCKM is that, because of the unsupervised core, the final model can achieve higher performance in semi-supervised node classification when few labels are available for training. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Unsupervised Neighborhood Propagation Kernel Layers for Semi-supervised Node Classification

Label noise poses an important challenge in machine learning, especially in deep learning, in which large models with high expressive power dominate the field. Models of that kind are prone to memorizing incorrect labels, thereby harming generalization performance. Many methods have been proposed to address this problem, including robust loss functions and more complex label correction approaches. Robust loss functions are appealing due to their simplicity, but typically lack flexibility, while label correction usually adds substantial complexity to the training setup. In this paper, we suggest to address the shortcomings of both methodologies by "ambiguating" the target information, adding additional, complementary candidate labels in case the learner is not sufficiently convinced of the observed training label. More precisely, we leverage the framework of so-called superset learning to construct set-valued targets based on a confidence threshold, which deliver imprecise yet more reliable beliefs about the ground-truth, effectively helping the learner to suppress the memorization effect. In an extensive empirical evaluation, our method demonstrates favorable learning behavior on synthetic and real-world noise, confirming the effectiveness in detecting and correcting erroneous training labels.

Mitigating Label Noise through Data Ambiguation

Federated Graph Learning is a privacy-preserving collaborative approach for training a shared model on graph-structured data in the distributed environment. However, in real-world scenarios, the client graph data usually originate from diverse domains, this unavoidably hinders the generalization performance of the final global model. To address this challenge, we start the first attempt to investigate this scenario by learning a well-generalizable model. In order to improve the performance of the global model from different perspectives, we propose a novel framework called Federated Graph Learning with Generalizable Prototypes (FGGP). It decouples the global model into two levels and bridges them via prototypes.  These prototypes, which are semantic centers derived from the feature extractor, can provide valuable classification information. At the classification model level, we innovatively eschew the traditional classifiers, then instead leverage clustered prototypes to capture fruitful domain information and enhance the discriminative capability of the classes, improving the performance of multi-domain predictions. Furthermore, at the feature extractor level, we go beyond traditional approaches by implicitly injecting distinct global knowledge and employing contrastive learning to obtain more powerful prototypes while enhancing the feature extractor generalization ability. Experimental results on various datasets are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Federated Graph Learning under Domain Shift with Generalizable Prototypes

While there is universal agreement that agents ought to act ethically, there is no agreement as to what constitutes ethical behaviour. To address this problem, recent philosophical approaches to `moral uncertainty' propose aggregation of multiple ethical theories to guide agent behaviour. However, one of the foundational proposals for aggregation - Maximising Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) - has been criticised as being vulnerable to fanaticism; the problem of an ethical theory dominating agent behaviour despite low credence (confidence) in said theory. Fanaticism thus undermines the `democratic' motivation for accommodating multiple ethical perspectives. The problem of fanaticism has not yet been mathematically defined. Representing moral uncertainty as an instance of social welfare aggregation, this paper contributes to the field of moral uncertainty by 1) formalising the problem of fanaticism as a property of social welfare functionals and  2) providing non-fanatical alternatives to MEC, i.e. Highest k-trimmed Mean and Highest Median.

Moral Uncertainty and the Problem of Fanaticism | VIDEO

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a cornerstone operator for video surveillance applications. To enable real-time processing of large-scale live video streams, we study an interesting scenario called down-sampled MOT, which performs object tracking only on a small subset of video frames. The problem is challenging for state-of-the-art MOT methods, which exhibit significant performance degradation under high frame reduction ratios. In this paper, we devise a sampling-resilient tracker with a novel sparse-observation Kalman filter (SOKF). It integrates an LSTM network to capture non-linear and dynamic motion patterns caused by sparse observations. Since the LSTM-based state transition is not compatible with the original noise estimation mechanism, we propose new estimation strategies based on Bayesian neural networks and derive the optimal Kalman gain for SOKF. To associate the detected bounding boxes robustly, we also propose a comprehensive similarity metric that systematically integrates multiple spatial matching signals. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed tracker achieves the best trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. With the same tracking accuracy, we reduce the total processing time of ByteTrack by 2× in MOT17 and 3× in DanceTrack.

Sampling-Resilient Multi-Object Tracking

Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate through realistic 3D outdoor environments based on natural language instructions. The performance of existing VLN methods is limited by insufficient diversity in navigation environments and limited training data. To address these issues, we propose VLN-Video, which utilizes the diverse outdoor environments present in driving videos in multiple cities in the U.S. augmented with automatically generated navigation instructions and actions to improve outdoor VLN performance. VLN-Video combines the best of intuitive classical approaches and modern deep learning techniques, using template infilling to generate grounded non-repetitive navigation instructions, combined with an image rotation similarity based navigation action predictor to obtain VLN style data from driving videos for pretraining deep learning VLN models. We pre-train the model on the Touchdown dataset and our video-augmented dataset created from driving videos with three proxy tasks: Masked Language Modeling, Instruction and Trajectory Matching, and Next Action Prediction, so as to learn temporally-aware and visually-aligned instruction representations. The learned instruction representation is adapted to the state-of-the-art navigation agent when fine-tuning on the Touchdown dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that VLN-Video significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by 2.1% in task completion rate, achieving a new state-of-the-art on the Touchdown dataset.

VLN-Video: Utilizing Driving Videos for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation

We introduce QuaterGCN, a spectral Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with quaternion-valued weights at whose core lies the Quaternionic Laplacian, a quaternion-valued Laplacian matrix by whose proposal we generalize two widely-used Laplacian matrices: the classical Laplacian (defined for undirected graphs) and the complex-valued Sign-Magnetic Laplacian (proposed within the spectral GCN SigMaNet to handle digraphs with weights of arbitrary sign). In addition to its generality, QuaterGCN is the only Laplacian to completely preserve the (di)graph topology that we are aware of, as it can handle graphs and digraphs containing antiparallel pairs of edges (digons) of different weight without reducing them to a single (directed or undirected) edge as done by other Laplacians. Experimental results show the superior performance of QuaterGCN compared to other state-of-the-art GCNs, particularly in scenarios where the information the digons carry is crucial to successfully address the task at hand.

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