Singapore

Recent advances in long video understanding typically mitigate visual redundancy through visual token pruning based on attention distribution. However, while existing methods employ post-hoc low-response token pruning in decoder layers, they overlook the input-level semantic correlation between visual tokens and instructions (query). In this paper, we propose QuoTA, an ante-hoc training-free modular that extends existing large video-language models (LVLMs) for visual token assignment based on query-oriented frame-level importance assessment. The query-oriented token selection is crucial as it aligns visual processing with task-specific requirements, optimizing token budget utilization while preserving semantically relevant content. Specifically, (i) QuoTA strategically allocates frame-level importance scores based on query relevance, enabling one-time visual token assignment before cross-modal interactions in decoder layers, (ii) we decouple the query through Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning to facilitate more precise LVLM-based frame importance scoring, and (iii) QuoTA offers a plug-and-play functionality that extends to existing LVLMs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that implementing QuoTA with LLaVA-Video-7B yields an average performance improvement of 3.2% across six benchmarks (including Video-MME and MLVU) while operating within an identical visual token budget as the baseline.

AAAI 2026

QuoTA: Query-oriented Token Assignment via CoT Query Decouple for Long Video Comprehension

visual token assignment

video large language model

long video understanding

chain-of-thought

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.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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-26 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.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Existing text-video retrieval methods mainly focus on single-modal video content (i.e., visual entities), often overlooking heterogeneous scene text that is ubiquitous in human environments. Although scene text in videos provides fine-grained semantics for cross-modal retrieval, effectively utilizing it presents two key challenges: (1) Temporally dense scene text disrupts sync with sparse video frames, obstructing video understanding; (2) Redundant scene text and irrelevant video frames hinder the learning of discriminative temporal clues for retrieval. To address them, we propose a temporal scene-text calibrating and distilling (TCD) network for text-video retrieval. Specifically, we first design a window-OCR captioner that aggregates dense scene text into OCR captions to facilitate feature interaction. Next, we devise a heterogeneous semantics calibration module that leverages scene text as a self-supervised signal to temporally align window-level OCR captions and frame-level video features. Further, we introduce a context-guided temporal clue distillation module to learn the complementary and relevant details between scene text and video modalities, thereby obtaining discriminative temporal clues for retrieval. Extensive experiments show that our TCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on three scene-text related benchmarks. Demo is available at the anonymous link https://tcd365.github.io.

Temporal Calibrating and Distilling for Scene-Text Aware Text-Video Retrieval

Semantic scene completion simultaneously reconstructs the shapes of missing regions and predicts semantic labels for the entire 3D scene. Although point cloud-based methods are more efficient than voxel-based methods, existing point cloud-based approaches largely fail to fully leverage semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a Prototype-Guided Transformer (ProtoFormer) that encodes semantic information into a set of semantic prototypes to guide the underlying Transformer for semantic scene completion. Specifically, we leverage semantic prototypes to enhance information from both geometric and semantic perspectives, and integrate the top-K attention mechanisms to guide scene completion and semantic awareness. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that ProtoFormer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with low complexity. ProtoFormer improves efficiency by 429\% compared to CasFusionNet.

Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion with Prototype-Guided Transformer

Explainability plays a critical role in understanding the workings of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). While recent methods have introduced causal inference into GNN explanation, they predominantly rely on individual-level interventions and lack rigorous statistical causality testing, resulting in unfaithful and unreliable explanations. To address these challenges, we propose CastX that integrates cohort-level causal analysis with statistical causality testing for GNN explanations. Specifically, CastX formulates the discovery of explanatory subgraphs as a dynamic edge pruning task guided by Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation. A reinforcement learning agent is employed to iteratively eliminate spurious edges and identify causally informative substructures. To further enhance reliability, we introduce an i.i.d.-agnostic non-parametric permutation test that assesses the statistical significance of each target edge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our CastX outperforms existing methods in yielding explanatory subgraphs that are concise, faithful, reliable, and statistically supported.

CastX: Cohort-Level Causal Inference Meets Statistical Testing for Faithful and Reliable GNN Explanations

Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated content lacking factual or contextual grounding, hindering their reliability in critical applications. Traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback are data-intensive and computationally expensive, while static parameter editing struggles with context-dependent errors and catastrophic forgetting. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LLM-CAS, a framework that formulates real-time hallucination correction as a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) problem. LLM-CAS trains an agent to learn a sophisticated policy, dynamically selecting optimal, temporary neuron perturbations during inference based on the immediate context. This learned, policy-driven approach provides greater adaptability than prior dynamic methods that rely on heuristic or pre-defined adjustments. As a result, LLM-CAS achieves significant performance gains across various LLMs, improving accuracy by 10.98 percentage points on StoryCloze, 2.71 points on TriviaQA, and 2.06 points on TruthfulQA's MC1 score, thereby outperforming static methods like ITI and CAA, as well as the dynamic SADI framework. This context-aware, efficient approach promises enhanced reliability for LLMs in high-stakes domains, with future potential for multimodal extensions.

LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction

Autonomous agents play a crucial role in advancing Artificial General Intelligence, enabling problem decomposition and tool orchestration through Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off. On one hand, reusable fixed workflows require manual reconfiguration upon environmental changes; on the other hand, flexible reactive loops fail to distill reasoning progress into transferable structures. We introduce Hierarchical Variable Agent (HiVA), a novel framework modeling agentic workflows as self-organized graphs with the Semantic-Topological Evolution (STEV) algorithm, which optimizes hybrid semantic-topological spaces using textual gradients as discrete-domain surrogates for backpropagation. The iterative process comprises Multi-Armed Bandit-infused forward routing, diagnostic gradient generation from environmental feedback, and coordinated updates that co-evolve individual semantics and topology for collective optimization in unknown environments. Experiments on dialogue, coding, Long-context Q\&A, mathematical, and agentic benchmarks demonstrate improvements of 5-10\% in task accuracy and enhanced resource efficiency over existing baselines, establishing HiVA's effectiveness in autonomous task execution.

HiVA: Self-organized Hierarchical Variable Agent via Goal-driven Semantic-Topological Evolution

Training-free video understanding methods leverage the strong image comprehension capabilities of pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) by treating videos as a sequences of static frames, thus obviating the need for costly video-specific training. However, this paradigm often suffers from severe visual redundancy and high computational overhead, especially when processing long videos. Crucially, existing keyframe selection strategies, especially those based on CLIP similarity, are prone to biases and may inadvertently overlook critical frames, resulting in suboptimal video comprehension.
To address these significant challenges, we propose KTV, a novel two-stage framework for efficient and effective training-free video understanding.
In the first stage, KTV performs question-agnostic keyframe selection by clustering frame-level visual features, yielding a compact, diverse, and representative subset of frames that mitigates temporal redundancy. In the second stage, KTV applies key visual token selection, pruning redundant or less informative tokens from each selected keyframe based on token importance and redundancy, which significantly reduces the number of tokens fed into the LLM.
Extensive experiments on the Multiple-Choice VideoQA task demonstrate that KTV outperforms state-of-the-art training-free baselines while using significantly fewer visual tokens, e.g., only 504 tokens for a 60 min video with 10800 frames, achieving 44.8\% accuracy on the MLVU-Test benchmark. In particular, KTV also exceeds several training-based approaches on certain benchmarks. The code is released anonymously in the supplementary materials.

KTV: Keyframes and Key Tokens Selection for Efficient Training-Free Video LLMs

Multimodal graphs, where nodes contain heterogeneous features such as images and text, are increasingly common in real-world applications. Effectively learning on such graphs requires both adaptive intra-modal message passing and efficient inter-modal aggregation. However, most existing approaches to multimodal graph learning are typically extended from conventional graph neural networks and rely on static structures or dense attention, which limit flexibility and expressive node embedding learning. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal graph representation learning framework with Dynamic information Pathways (DiP). By introducing modality-specific pseudo nodes, DiP enables dynamic message routing within each modality via proximity-guided pseudo-node interactions and captures inter-modality dependence through efficient information pathways in a shared state space. This design achieves adaptive, expressive, and sparse message propagation across modalities with linear complexity. We conduct the link prediction and node classification tasks to evaluate performance and carry out full experimental analyses. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DiP consistently outperforms baselines.

Multimodal Graph Representation Learning with Dynamic Information Pathways

Mobile agents show immense potential, yet current state-of-the-art (SoTA) agents exhibit inadequate success rates on real-world, long-horizon, cross-application tasks. We attribute this bottleneck to the agents' excessive reliance on static, internal knowledge within MLLMs, which leads to two critical failure points: 1) strategic hallucinations in high-level planning and 2) operational errors during low-level execution on user interfaces (UI). The core insight of this paper is that high-level planning and low-level UI operations require fundamentally distinct types of knowledge. Planning demands high-level, strategy-oriented experiences, whereas operations necessitate low-level, precise instructions closely tied to specific app UIs. Motivated by these insights, we propose Mobile-Agent-RAG, a novel hierarchical multi-agent framework that innovatively integrates dual-level retrieval augmentation. At the planning stage, we introduce Manager-RAG to reduce strategic hallucinations by retrieving human-validated comprehensive task plans that provide high-level guidance. At the execution stage, we develop Operator-RAG to improve execution accuracy by retrieving the most precise low-level guidance for accurate atomic actions, aligned with the current app and subtask. To accurately deliver these knowledge types, we construct two specialized retrieval-oriented knowledge bases. Furthermore, we introduce Mobile-Eval-RAG, a challenging benchmark for evaluating such agents on realistic multi-app, long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-RAG significantly outperforms SoTA baselines, improving task completion rate by 11.0\% and step efficiency by 10.2\%, establishing a robust paradigm for context-aware, reliable multi-agent mobile automation.

Mobile-Agent-RAG: Driving Smart Multi-Agent Coordination with Contextual Knowledge Empowerment for Long-Horizon Mobile Automation

Chinese opera is celebrated for preserving classical art. However, early filming equipment limitations have degraded videos of last-century performances by renowned artists (e.g., low frame rates and resolution), hindering archival efforts. Although space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) has advanced significantly, applying it directly to opera videos remains challenging. The scarcity of datasets impedes the recovery of high-frequency details, and existing STVSR methods lack global modeling capabilities—compromising visual quality when handling opera’s characteristic large motions. To address these challenges, we pioneer a large-scale Chinese Opera Video Clip (COVC) dataset and propose the Mamba-based multiscale fusion network for space-time Opera Video Super-Resolution (MambaOVSR). Specifically, MambaOVSR involves three novel components: the Global Fusion Module (GFM) for motion modeling through a multiscale alternating scanning mechanism, and the Multiscale Synergistic Mamba Module (MSMM) for alignment across different sequence lengths. Additionally, our MambaVR block resolves feature artifacts and positional information loss during alignment. Experimental results on the COVC dataset show that MambaOVSR significantly outperforms the SOTA STVSR method by an average of 1.86 dB in terms of PSNR. Dataset and Code will be publicly released.

MambaOVSR: Multiscale Fusion with Global Motion Modeling for Chinese Opera Video Super-Resolution

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often struggle with generalization to real-world scenarios due to the mismatch between observation and action spaces. While training data comes from diverse camera perspectives, the models predict end-effector poses in the robot base coordinate system, leading to inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose an Observation-Centric VLA (OC-VLA) framework, which directly grounds action predictions in the camera's observation space. By using the camera's extrinsic matrix to transform end-effector poses from the robot frame to the camera frame, our approach unifies prediction targets across different viewpoints. This simple, plug-and-play method ensures consistent alignment between perception and action, improving model robustness to camera viewpoint variations. Our method offers a straightforward solution that can be easily integrated into existing VLA models without significant architectural changes. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that OC-VLA achieves better convergence, improves task success rates, and enhances generalization across camera viewpoints. The code will be publicly available.

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