Singapore

Large language models (LLMs) have recently empowered multi-agent systems (MAS) to achieve remarkable advances in collaborative reasoning and complex task automation. The effectiveness of these systems fundamentally depends on the design of adaptive **communication graphs**—the underlying workflows that coordinate agent interactions. However, in real-world scenarios, strict privacy constraints often silo data across organizations, and client distributions are highly non-IID, posing major challenges for synthesizing such workflows. In this work, we are **the first to systematically study distributed multi-agent workflow synthesis** under these privacy and heterogeneity constraints, and we introduce the Difficulty-Based Skew (DBS) benchmark to emulate such challenging environments. Drawing inspiration from federated graph learning (FGL)—which has primarily focused on classification over static graphs—we identify a critical gap: existing FGL methods do not address the generative design of communication topologies. We reveal two fundamental obstacles to generative workflow synthesis in this setting: (i) **workflow specialization conflict**, where agents optimized for different task distributions generate incompatible communication patterns that resist meaningful aggregation, and (ii) **structural communication shift**, where locally optimal agent interaction graphs fail to compose into globally coherent multi-agent workflows. To address these challenges, we propose **DAWN**, a federated framework that integrates two key innovations: **Parametric Resonance**, which robustly aggregates heterogeneous local updates via layer-wise SVD-based denoising and alignment, and **Structural Gravity**, which regularizes local workflow generation by penalizing the Fusion Gromov-Wasserstein distance to a set of prototype communication graphs, ensuring global structural coherence without stifling local adaptation. Experiments on the DBS benchmark show that **DAWN** surpasses baselines in global task success and reduces inter-client graph divergence, laying a solid foundation for privacy-preserving, adaptive MAS workflow design in heterogeneous settings.

AAAI 2026

DAWN: Distributed LLM Multi-Agent Workflow Synthesis

mas: distributed problem solving

prs: planning with language models

mas: coordination and collaboration

## 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.

poster

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.

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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.

We present a novel framework for online learning in Stackelberg general-sum games, where two agents, the leader and follower, engage in sequential turn-based interactions. At the core of this approach is a learned diffeomorphism that maps the joint action space to a smooth spherical Riemannian manifold, referred to as the Stackelberg manifold. This mapping, facilitated by neural normalizing flows, ensures the formation of tractable isoplanar subspaces, enabling efficient techniques for online learning. Leveraging the linearity of the agents' reward functions on the Stackelberg manifold, our construct allows the application of linear bandit algorithms. We then provide a rigorous theoretical basis for regret minimization on the learned manifold and establish bounds on the simple regret for learning Stackelberg equilibrium. This integration of manifold learning into game theory uncovers a previously unrecognized potential for neural normalizing flows as an effective tool for multi-agent learning. We present empirical results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach compared to standard baselines, with applications spanning domains such as cybersecurity and economic supply chain optimization.

Riemannian Manifold Learning for Stackelberg Games with Neural Flow Representations

Supervised learning with distributional inputs is a classic area of machine learning, and recently the two-stage sampling setup has received considerable attention. 
In this setting, the inputs (which are probability distributions) are not accessible in the learning phase, but only samples thereof. 
This problem is particularly amenable to kernel-based learning methods, where the distributions or samples are first embedded into a Hilbert space, often using kernel mean embeddings (KMEs), and then a standard kernel method like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is applied, using a kernel defined on the embedding Hilbert space.
The case of distributional regression has received particular attention and there is by now a substantial body of theory available, including learning rates.
In contrast, the case of distributional classification is considerably less investigated, despite being relevant for applications like learning-based medical screening or causal learning.
Motivated by this, we provide a thorough analysis of classification with distributional inputs in the two-stage sampling setup using SVMs, in particular, establishing consistency and learning rate results.
Furthermore, for SVMs using the hinge loss and Gaussian kernels, we formulate a novel variant of an established noise assumption from the binary classification literature, under which we can establish learning rates.
Our results are formulated in significant generality, with many results also applicable to learning problems other than classification.
Furthermore, some of our technical tools like a new feature space for Gaussian kernels on Hilbert spaces are of independent interest.

Statistical Learning Theory for Distributional Classification

Recent advances demonstrate that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RLVR faces challenges with reward sparsity, where zero rewards from consistently incorrect candidate answers provide no learning signal, particularly in challenging tasks. To address this, we propose, we propose \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{E}xpert \textbf{M}utual \textbf{L}earning GRPO (MEML-GRPO), an innovative framework that utilizes diverse expert prompts as system prompts to generate a broader range of responses, substantially increasing the likelihood of identifying correct solutions. Additionally, we introduce an inter-expert mutual learning mechanism that facilitates knowledge sharing and transfer among experts, further boosting the model’s performance through RLVR. Extensive experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that MEML-GRPO delivers significant improvements, achieving an average performance gain of 4.89\% with Qwen and 11.33\% with Llama, effectively overcoming the core limitations of traditional RLVR methods.

MEML-GRPO: Heterogeneous Multi-Expert Mutual Learning for RLVR Advancement

Machine unlearning is a newly popularized technique for removing specific training data from a trained model, enabling it to comply with data deletion requests. While it protects the rights of users requesting unlearning, it also introduces new privacy risks. Prior works have primarily focused on the privacy of data that has been unlearned, while the risks to retained data remain largely unexplored. 
To address this gap, we focus on the privacy risks of retained data and, for the first time, reveal the vulnerabilities introduced by machine unlearning under the \textbf{dual-view} setting, where an adversary can query both the original and the unlearned models. From an information-theoretic perspective, we introduce the concept of {privacy knowledge gain} and demonstrate that the dual-view setting allows adversaries to obtain more information than querying either model alone, thereby amplifying privacy leakage. To effectively demonstrate this threat, we propose DVIA, a \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{I}nference \textbf{A}ttack, which extracts membership information on retained data using black-box queries to both models. DVIA eliminates the need to train an attack model and employs a lightweight likelihood ratio inference module for efficient inference. Experiments across different datasets and model architectures validate the effectiveness of DVIA and highlight the privacy risks inherent in the dual-view setting.

Dual-View Inference Attack: Machine Unlearning Amplifies Privacy Exposure

Image clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised visual learning. While recent self-supervised methods have explored various pretext tasks to generate supervision signals for clustering, they typically depend exclusively on raw images, resulting in insufficient supervision signals that are inherently constrained by limited visual semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic-Augmented image Clustering (SAC) method, which transcends the inherent limitations of purely visual representations through the integration of external knowledge. Specifically, SAC utilizes Vision-Language pre-trained Models (VLMs) to flexibly generate textual descriptions for each image, providing external semantic cues to supplement the visual information. By integrating both visual and textual information, SAC achieves image clustering through a multi-modal learning framework. To mitigate the negative impact of inaccurate textual information, SAC designs an uncertainty-driven adaptive weighting mechanism that explores both intra-modal and inter-modal neighborhood structures, and incorporates the adaptive weights into intra-modal and inter-modal contrastive learning, which improves the robustness against noisy image-text correspondences. Experiments on several popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAC compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Semantic-Augmented Image Clustering via Adaptive Multi-Modal Collaboration

Micro-video label prediction plays a pivotal role on contemporary video-sharing platforms, such as Kwai and Tiktok. The emergence of video content lacking labels presents a formidable challenge for conventional user interest prediction methods. This paper addresses the challenge of micro-video label prediction, particularly for unseen videos, by proposing a zero-shot method called Class Semantic Relation Learning (CSRL). Unlike traditional user interest prediction models, CSRL leverages the pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to enhance prediction accuracy for unlabeled videos. The novelty of CSRL lies in its integration of three key components: a raw feature autoencoder, LLM-enhanced features, and a decomposed graph network. The decomposed graph network is specifically designed to disentangle the relationships between labeled and unlabeled videos, offering a significant improvement over previous methods. By fusing hidden topics with LLM-enhanced text, CSRL effectively handles sparse video features. Experiments on large-scale datasets from the Kwai platform show that CSRL achieves state-of-the-art results, with up to 44.64\% improvement in Hit Ratio (HR), highlighting its superiority over existing zero-shot recommendation models in predicting user interests within the user-video network.

Zero-shot Recommendation: Towards Class Semantic Relation Learning for Inferring Labels of Unseen Micro-videos

Existing open-source datasets for arbitrary-instruction image editing remain suboptimal, while a plug-and-play editing module compatible with community-prevalent generative models is notably absent. In this paper, we first introduce the X2Edit Dataset, a comprehensive dataset covering 14 diverse editing tasks, including subject-driven generation. We utilize the industry-leading unified image generation models and expert models to construct the data. Meanwhile, we design reasonable editing instructions with the VLM and implement various scoring mechanisms to filter the data. As a result, we construct 3.7 million high-quality data with balanced categories. Second, to better integrate seamlessly with community image generation models, we design task-aware MoE-LoRA training based on FLUX.1, with only 8% of the parameters of the full model. To further improve the final performance, we utilize the internal representations of the diffusion model and define positive/negative samples based on image editing types to introduce contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the model's editing performance is competitive among many excellent models. Additionally, the constructed dataset exhibits substantial advantages over existing open-source datasets.

X2Edit: Revisiting Arbitrary-Instruction Image Editing Through Self-Constructed Data and Task-Aware Representation Learning

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has recently seen a surge of interest as a simple yet powerful tool for large language models (LLMs) compression, with a growing number of works demonstrating 20 - 80\% parameter reductions at minimal accuracy loss. Previous SVD-based approaches have focused primarily on reducing the memory footprint of model weights, largely overlooking the additional activation memory overhead incurred during inference when applying truncated factors via standard dense CUDA kernels. Our experiments demonstrate that this activation overhead, scaling with sequence length and hidden dimension, prevents current SVD compression techniques from achieving any reduction in peak inference memory, thereby limiting their viability for real-world, on-device deployments. 

We introduce \textbf{FlashSVD}, a novel, end-to-end rank-aware streaming inference framework specifically designed for SVD-compressed large language models. FlashSVD can be seamlessly integrated with any model that employs SVD-based methods for parameter reduction. By fusing low-rank projection kernels directly into both the self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN) pipelines, FlashSVD avoid materializing full‐size activation buffers. Instead, small tiles of the truncated factors are loaded into on-chip SRAM, multiplied and reduced on the fly, and immediately evicted, preserving high GPU occupancy and adding no extra latency. On standard encoder benchmarks (e.g., BERT-Base), FlashSVD cuts peak activation memory by up to 70.2\% and intermediate transient memory by 75\%, all while incur no accuracy loss with upstreaming compression methods, offering a practical path toward memory-constrained deployment of low-rank LLMs.

FlashSVD: Memory-Efficient Inference with Streaming for Low-Rank Models

Generating sketches with specific patterns as expected, i.e., manipulating sketches in a controllable way, is a popular task. Recent studies control sketch features at stroke-level by editing values of stroke embeddings as conditions. However, in order to provide generator a global view about what a sketch is going to be drawn, all these edited conditions should be collected and fed into generator simultaneously before generation starts, i.e., no further manipulation is allowed during sketch generating process. In order to realize sketch drawing manipulation more flexibly, we propose a hierarchical auto-regressive sketch generating process. Instead of generating an entire sketch at once, each stroke in a sketch is generated in a three-staged hierarchy: 1) predicting a stroke embedding to represent which stroke is going to be drawn, and 2) anchoring the predicted stroke on the canvas, and 3) translating the embedding to a sequence of drawing actions to form the full sketch. Moreover, the stroke prediction, anchoring and translation are proceeded auto-regressively, i.e., both the recently generated strokes and their positions are considered to predict the current one, guiding model to produce an appropriate stroke at a suitable position to benefit the full sketch generation. It is flexible to manipulate stroke-level sketch drawing at any time during generation by adjusting the exposed editable stroke embeddings.

Generating Sketches in a Hierarchical Auto-Regressive Process for Flexible Sketch Drawing Manipulation at Stroke-Level

In this work, we introduce a novel high-fidelity full-head 3D avatar generation method from a single image, regardless of perspective, style, expression, or accessories. Prior works often fail to preserve consistent head geometry and facial details, primarily due to their limited capacity in modeling fine-grained facial textures and maintaining identity information. To address these challenges, we construct a new high-quality dataset containing 227 sequences of digital human portraits captured from 96 different perspectives, totalling 21,792 frames, featuring high-quality facial texture details. To further improve performance, we propose a novel multi-view diffusion named ID-TS diffusion model, which integrate identity and expression information into the two-stage multi-view diffusion process. The low-resolution stage ensures structural consistency of heads across multiple views, while the high-resolution stage preserves facial detail fidelity and coherence. Finally, we propose an enhanced feed-forward Gaussian avatar reconstruction method that optimizes the network on multi-view images of each single subject, significantly improving 3D facial texture details. Extensive experiments show that our method demonstrates robust performance across challenging scenarios, while showcasing broad applicability across numerous downstream tasks.

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