Singapore

Workflow automation promises substantial productivity gains in everyday document-related tasks. While prior agentic systems can execute isolated instructions, they struggle with automating multi-step, session-level workflows due to limited control over the operational process. To this end, we introduce AutoDW, a novel execution framework that enables stepwise, rollback-enabled operation orchestration. AutoDW incrementally plans API actions conditioned on user instructions, intent-filtered API candidates, and the evolving states of the document. It further employs robust rollback mechanisms at both the argument and API levels, enabling dynamic correction and fault tolerance. These designs together ensure that the execution trajectory of AutoDW remains aligned with user intent and document context across long-horizon workflows. To assess its effectiveness, we construct a comprehensive benchmark of 250 sessions and 1,708 human-annotated instructions, reflecting realistic document processing scenarios with interdependent instructions. AutoDW achieves 90% and 62% completion rates on instruction- and session-level tasks, respectively, outperforming strong baselines by 40% and 76%. Moreover, AutoDW also remains robust for the decision of backbone LLMs and on tasks with varying difficulty. Code and data will be open-sourced.

AAAI 2026

Automating Complex Document Workflows via Stepwise and Rollback-Enabled Operation Orchestration

prs: plan execution and monitoring

mas: applications

mas: multiagent planning

## 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.

Unsupervised Change Detection (UCD) in Very High Resolution (VHR) Remote Sensing (RS) images remains to be a difficult challenge due to the inherent spatio-temporal complexity within data. Inspired by recent advancements in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and Contrastive Learning (CL) methodologies, this research aims to develop CL methodologies to translate implicit knowledge in VFM into change representations, thus eliminating the need for explicit supervision. To this end, we introduce a Semantic-to-Change (S2C) learning framework for UCD in VHR RS images. Differently from existing CL methodologies that typically focus on learning multi-temporal similarities, we introduce a novel triplet learning strategy that explicitly models temporal differences, which are crucial to the CD task. Furthermore, random spatial and spectral perturbations are introduced during the training to enhance robustness to temporal noise. In addition, a grid sparsity regularization is defined to suppress insignificant changes, and an IoU-matching algorithm is developed to refine the CD results. Experiments on three benchmark CD datasets demonstrate that the proposed S2C learning framework achieves significant improvements in accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art by over 31%, 9% and 23%, respectively. It also demonstrates robustness and sample efficiency, suitable for training and adaptation of various Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) or backbone neural networks.

S2C: A Noise-Resistant Difference Learning Framework for Unsupervised Change Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images

The spiking neuron model (SNM) mimics the processing paradigm of synaptic and membrane potentials in the cerebral cortex. However, existing SNMs are limited by two issues. First, they lack spike diversity. Although a spiking neuron perceives temporally varying input currents, SNMs only use identical synaptic weights for regulation. Second, they are insensitive to weak spikes. The potential accumulation in SNMs is solely driven by external inputs, ignoring the internal dynamics of potential. Oligodendrocytes, a recent revelation in neuroscience, enhance neural signaling by forming bidirectional communication. This offers the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we first propose the mechanism of the oligodendrocyte-spiking neuron (Oli-N) model. Subsequently, using the Oli-N model, we develop our Oli-inspired spiking neural network (Oli-SNN), which broadens the diversity of spike representations and enhances neurons' firing precision through improved sparse coding to enhance weak spikes. Experiments show that our Oli-SNN achieves state-of-the-art performance in the classification task on both static and neuromorphic datasets.

Oligodendrocyte-Driven Spiking Neural Model

Predicting drug–target interactions (DTIs) is a fundamental task in computational drug discovery, yet it remains challenging under distribution shifts and limited training data. Existing approaches often suffer from poor generalization, weak cross-modal alignment between molecular and protein representations, and vulnerability to noisy supervision.We propose ESP-DTI, a unified framework designed to enhance generalization by integrating large-scale protein language models with curriculum learning and cross-modal contrastive alignment. Specifically, we leverage ESM-2 to encode context-aware protein representations and adopt a CLIP-style contrastive objective to align drug and protein embeddings in a shared latent space. To further improve learning robustness, we introduce a progressive curriculum sampling strategy that dynamically schedules training instances based on model confidence, enabling a gradual shift from easy to hard examples.Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that ESP-DTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a +3.1% improvement in average accuracy. Ablation studies confirm the complementary benefits of each component, validating their collective contribution to robust and generalizable DTI prediction.Our work underscores the effectiveness of combining pretrained protein language models with structured training curricula and cross-modal contrastive learning for reliable DTI prediction under real-world, distribution-shifted conditions.The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ESP-DTI-C926

Generalizable Drug–Target Interaction Prediction via ESM-2 Representations and Progressive Contrastive Curriculum Learning

Scalable and generalizable analysis of brain activity is essential for advancing both clinical diagnostics and cognitive research. Electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive modality with high temporal resolution, has been widely used for brain states analysis. However, most exiting EEG models are usually tailored for single specific tasks, limiting their utility in realistic scenarios where EEG analysis often involves multi-task and continuous reasoning. In this work, we introduce EEG Agent, a general-purpose framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to schedule and plan multiple tools to automatically complete EEG-related tasks. EEG Agent is capable of performing the key functions: EEG basic information perception, spatiotemporal EEG exploration, EEG event detection, interaction with users, and EEG report generation. To realize the capabilities, we design a toolbox composed of different tools for EEG preprocessing, feature extraction, event detection, etc. These capabilities were evaluated on public datasets, and our EEG Agent can support flexible and interpretable EEG analysis, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications.

EEG Agent: A Unified Framework for Automated EEG Analysis Using Large Language Models

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others’ mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Equipping large language models (LLMs)-driven agents with ToM has been shown to improve their coordination in multiagent collaborative tasks. However, we find that the mismatches in ToM reasoning depth between agents—what we call misaligned ToM orders—can lead to insufficient or excessive reasoning about others, thereby impairing their coordination. To address this issue, we design an adaptive ToM (A-ToM) agent, which can align in ToM orders with its partner. Based on prior interactions, the agent estimates the partner’s likely ToM order and leverages this estimation to predict the partner’s action, thereby facilitating behavioral coordination. We conduct empirical evaluations on four multi-agent coordination tasks: a repeated matrix game, two grid navigation tasks and an Overcooked task. The results validate our findings on ToM alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our A-ToM agent. Furthermore, we investigate the applicability of both our findings and the A-ToM agent.

Adaptive Theory of Mind for LLM-based Multi-Agent Coordination

Continual Learning (CL) seeks to enable neural networks to incrementally acquire new knowledge (plasticity) while retaining existing knowledge (stability). Although pre-trained models (PTMs) have provided a strong foundation for CL, existing approaches face a fundamental challenge in balancing these two competing objectives. Current methods typically address stability by freezing the PTM backbone, which severely limits the model's plasticity, particularly when incoming data distribution diverges largely from the pre-training data. Alternatively, sequentially fine-tuning the entire PTM can adapt to new knowledge but often leads to catastrophic forgetting, highlighting the critical stability-plasticity trade-off in PTM-based CL. To address this limitation, we propose **A**dapting PTMs before the core **CL** process (ACL), a novel framework that introduces a plug-and-play adaptation phase prior to learning each new task. During this phase, ACL refines the PTM backbone by aligning embeddings with their original class prototypes while distancing them from irrelevant classes. This mechanism theoretically and empirically demonstrates desirable balance between stability and plasticity, significantly improving CL performance across benchmarks and integrated methods.

Adapt Before Continual Learning

Traditional knowledge distillation relies on simple MSE or KL divergence losses that fail to capture the complex distributional relationships between teacher and student model representations. We propose FlowDistill, a novel distillation framework that employs normalizing flows to model and transfer the intricate knowledge distributions from teacher to student models. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) Invertible Knowledge Mapping using continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) to learn bijective transformations between teacher and student representation spaces, enabling precise knowledge transfer without information loss, (2) Flow-Guided Progressive Distillation that gradually increases the complexity of knowledge transfer by learning hierarchical flow transformations from simple to complex distributions, and (3) Conditional Flow Networks that adapt knowledge transfer based on input context and task requirements. Unlike previous diffusion-based distillation methods such as DiffKD that suffer from computational overhead due to iterative denoising processes and information loss during noise addition, our flow-based approach provides exact invertible transformations with significantly reduced computational cost. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and Cityscapes semantic segmentation demonstrate that FlowDistill achieves superior performance with 2.1\% accuracy improvement over DiffKD on ResNet-34 to ResNet-18 distillation while reducing inference time by 3.5×. Our method establishes new state-of-the-art results across multiple distillation benchmarks and provides theoretical guarantees for lossless knowledge transfer through invertible flow transformations.

Flow-Based Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Large Model Distillation

In this work, we introduce the notion of targeting for multi-criteria decision making. The problem involves selecting the best alternatives related to one particular alternative, called the target. We use an axiomatic approach to this problem by establishing properties that any targeting method should satisfy. We present a representation theorem and show that satisfying the main properties of targeting requires aggregating the evaluations of the alternatives related to the target. We propose various candidate targeting methods and examine the properties satisfied by each method.

Targeting in Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Multi-turn instruction following is essential for building intelligent conversational systems that can consistently adhere to instructions across dialogue turns. However, existing approaches to enhancing multi-turn instruction following primarily rely on collecting or generating large-scale multi-turn dialogue datasets to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), which treat each response generation as an isolated task and fail to explicitly incorporate multi-turn instruction following into the optimization objectives. As a result, instruction-tuned LLMs often struggle with complex long-distance constraints. In multi-turn dialogues, relational constraints across turns can be naturally modeled as labeled directed edges, making graph structures particularly suitable for modeling multi-turn instruction following. Despite this potential, leveraging graph structures to enhance the multi-turn instruction following capabilities of LLMs remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose GraphIF, a plug-and-play framework that models multi-turn dialogues as directed relation graphs and leverages graph prompts to enhance the instruction following capabilities of LLMs. GraphIF comprises three key components: (1) an agent-based relation extraction module that captures inter-turn semantic relations via action-triggered mechanisms to construct structured graphs; (2) a relation graph prompt generation module that converts structured graph information into natural language prompts; and (3) a response rewriting module that refines initial LLM outputs using the generated graph prompts. Extensive experiments on two long multi-turn dialogue datasets demonstrate that GraphIF can be seamlessly integrated into instruction-tuned LLMs and leads to significant improvements across all four multi-turn instruction-following evaluation metrics, with gains ranging from 7% to 52%.

GraphIF: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models with Relation Graph Prompt

ColBERT introduced a late interaction mechanism that independently encodes queries and documents using BERT, and computes similarity via fine-grained interactions over token-level vector representations. This design enables expressive matching while allowing efficient computation of scores, as the multi-vector document representations could be pre-computed offline. 
ColBERT models distance using a Chamfer-style function: for each query token, it selects the closest document token and sums these distances across all query tokens.

In our work, we explore enhancements to the Chamfer distance function by computing a weighted sum over query token contributions, where weights reflect the token importance. Empirically, we show that this simple extension, requiring only token-weight training while keeping the multi-vector representations fixed, further enhances the expressiveness of late interaction multi-vector mechanism. In particular, on the BEIR benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of 1.28\% in Recall@10 in the zero-shot setting using IDF-based weights, and 3.66\% through few-shot fine-tuning.

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S2C: A Noise-Resistant Difference Learning Framework for Unsupervised Change Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images

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