United States

Characters are essential to the plot of any story. Establishing the characters before writing a story can improve the clarity of the plot and the overall flow of the narrative. However, previous work on visual storytelling tends to focus on detecting objects in images and discovering relationships between them. In this approach, characters are not distinguished from other objects when they are fed into the generation pipeline. The result is a coherent sequence of events rather than a character-centric story. In order to address this limitation, we introduce the VIST-Character dataset, which provides rich character-centric annotations, including visual and textual co-reference chains and importance ratings for characters. Based on this dataset, we propose two new tasks: important character detection and character grounding in visual stories. For both tasks, we develop simple, unsupervised models based on distributional similarity and pre-trained vision-and-language models. Our new dataset, together with these models, can serve as the foundation for subsequent work on analysing and generating stories from a character-centric perspective.

AAAI 2023

Detecting and Grounding Important Characters in Visual Stories

procedural content generation & storytelling

language grounding

language and vision

## 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

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/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.

Taxonomy is formulated as directed acyclic graphs or trees of concepts that support many downstream tasks.
Many new coming concepts need to be added to an existing taxonomy.
The traditional taxonomy expansion task aims only at finding the best position for new coming concepts in the existing taxonomy. 
However, they have two drawbacks when being applied to the real-scenarios.
The previous methods suffer from low-efficiency since they waste much time when most of the new coming concepts are indeed noisy concepts. They also suffer from low-effectiveness since they collect training samples only from the existing taxonomy, which limits the ability of the model to mine more hypernym-hyponym relationships among real concepts.
This paper proposes a pluggable framework called Generative Adversarial Network for Taxonomy Entering Evaluation (GANTEE) to alleviate these drawbacks.
A generative adversarial network is designed in this framework by discriminative models to alleviate the first drawback and the generative model to alleviate the second drawback.
Two discriminators are used in GANTEE to provide long-term and short-term rewards, respectively.
Moreover, to further improve the efficiency, pre-trained language models are used to retrieve the representation of the concepts quickly.
The experiments on three real-world large-scale datasets with two different languages show that GANTEE improves the performance of the existing taxonomy expansion methods in both effectiveness and efficiency.

GANTEE: Generative Adversarial Network for Taxonomy Enterance Evaluation

Event argument extraction (EAE) aims to identify the arguments of a given event, and classify the roles that those arguments play. Due to high data demands of training EAE models, zero-shot cross-lingual EAE has attracted increasing attention, as it greatly reduces human annotation effort. Some prior works indicate that generation-based methods have achieved promising performance for monolingual EAE. However, when applying existing generation-based methods to zero-shot cross-lingual EAE, we find two critical challenges, including Language Discrepancy and Template Construction. In this paper, we propose a novel method termed as Language-oriented Prefix-tuning Network (LAPIN) to address the above challenges. Specifically, we devise a Language-oriented Prefix Generator module to handle the discrepancies between source and target languages. Moreover, we leverage a Language-agnostic Template Constructor module to design templates that can be adapted to any language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the best performance, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model by 4.8% and 2.3% of the average F1-score on two multilingual EAE datasets.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Event Argument Extraction with Language-Oriented Prefix-Tuning

Active Directory (AD) is the default security management system for Windows domain networks.  An AD environment naturally describes an attack graph where nodes represent computers/accounts/security groups, and edges represent existing accesses/known exploits that allow the attacker to gain access from one node to another.  Motivated by practical AD use cases, we study a Stackelberg game between one attacker and one defender.  There are multiple entry nodes for the attacker to choose from and there is a single target (Domain Admin).  Every edge has a failure rate.  The attacker chooses the attack path with the maximum success rate.  The defender can block a limited number of edges (i.e., revoke accesses) from a set of blockable edges, limited by budget. The defender's aim is to minimize the attacker's success rate.

We exploit the tree-likeness of practical AD graphs to design scalable algorithms.  We propose two novel methods that combine theoretical fixed parameter analysis and practical optimisation techniques.

For graphs with small tree widths, we propose a tree decomposition based dynamic program.  We then propose a general method for converting tree decomposition based dynamic programs to reinforcement learning environments, which leads to an anytime algorithm that scales better, but loses the optimality guarantee.

For graphs with small numbers of non-splitting paths (a parameter we invent specifically for AD graphs), we propose a kernelization technique that significantly downsizes the model, which is then solved via mixed-integer programming.

Experimentally, our algorithms scale to handle synthetic AD graphs with tens of thousands of nodes.

Scalable Edge Blocking Algorithms for Defending Active Directory Style Attack Graphs

Detecting abnormal crowd motion emerging from complex interactions of individuals is paramount to ensure the safety of crowds. Crowd-level abnormal behaviors (CABs), e.g., counter flow and crowd turbulence, are proven to be the crucial causes of many crowd disasters. In the recent decade, video anomaly detection (VAD) techniques have achieved remarkable success in detecting individual-level abnormal behaviors (e.g., sudden running, fighting and stealing), but research on VAD for CABs is rather limited. Unlike individual-level anomaly, CABs usually do not exhibit salient difference from the normal behaviors when observed locally, and the scale of CABs could vary from one scenario to another. In this paper, we present a systematic study to tackle the important problem of VAD for CABs with a novel crowd motion learning framework, multi-scale motion consistency network (MSMC-Net). MSMC-Net first captures the spatial and temporal crowd motion consistency information in a graph representation. Then, it simultaneously trains multiple feature graphs constructed at different scales to capture rich crowd patterns. An attention network is used to adaptively fuse the multi-scale features for better CAB detection. For the empirical study, we consider three large-scale crowd event datasets, UMN, Hajj and Love Parade. Experimental results show that MSMC-Net could substantially improve the state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets.

Crowd-level Abnormal Behavior Detection via Multi-scale Motion Consistency Learning

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound. Unfortunately the required uncertainty is difficult to estimate in general with function approximation.

We propose epistemic value estimation (EVE): a recipe that is compatible with sequential decision making and with neural network function approximators. It equips agents with a tractable posterior over all their parameters from which epistemic value uncertainty can be computed efficiently.

We use the recipe to derive an epistemic Q-Learning agent and observe competitive performance on a series of benchmarks. Experiments confirm that the EVE recipe facilitates efficient exploration in hard exploration tasks.

Exploration via Epistemic Value Estimation

Unsupervised/self-supervised graph neural networks (GNN) are vulnerable to inherent randomness in the input graph data which greatly affects the performance of the model in downstream tasks. In this paper, we alleviate the interference of graph randomness and learn appropriate representations of nodes without label information. To this end, we propose USER, an unsupervised robust version of graph neural networks that is based on structural entropy. We analyze the property of intrinsic connectivity and define intrinsic connectivity graph. We also identify the rank of the adjacency matrix as a crucial factor in revealing a graph that provides the same embeddings as the intrinsic connectivity graph. We then introduce structural entropy in the objective function to capture such a graph. Extensive experiments conducted on clustering and link prediction tasks under random-noises and meta-attack over three datasets show USER outperforms benchmarks and is robust to heavier randomness.

USER: Unsupervised Structural Entropy-based Robust Graph Neural Network

The problem of document structure reconstruction refers to converting digital or scanned documents into corresponding semantic structures. Most existing works mainly focus on splitting the boundary of each element in a single document page, neglecting the reconstruction of semantic structure in multi-page documents. This paper introduces hierarchical reconstruction of document structures as a novel task suitable for NLP and CV fields. To better evaluate the system performance on the new task, we built a large-scale dataset named HRDoc, which consists of 2,500 multi-page documents with nearly 2 million semantic units. Every document in HRDoc has line-level annotations including categories and relations obtained from rule-based extractors and human annotators. Moreover, we proposed an encoder-decoder-based hierarchical document structure parsing system (DSPS) to tackle this problem. By adopting a multi-modal bidirectional encoder and a structure-aware GRU decoder with soft-mask operation, the DSPS model surpass the baseline method by a large margin. All scripts and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/jfma-USTC/HRDoc.

HRDoc: Dataset and Baseline Method Toward Hierarchical Reconstruction of Document Structures

Trustable explanations of machine learning (ML) models are vital in high-risk uses of artificial intelligence (AI). Apart from the computation of trustable explanations, a number of explainability queries have been identified and studied in recent work. Some of these queries involve solving quantification problems, either in propositional or in more expressive logics. This paper investigates one of these quantification problems, namely the feature membership problem (FMP), i.e. to decide whether a (possibly sensitive) feature can occur in some explanation of a prediction. In contrast with earlier work, that studied FMP for specific classifiers, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for the FMP quantification problem, that is applicable to any ML classifier. Furthermore, the paper shows that the novel algorithm is efficient in practice. The experimental results, obtained using random forests (RFs) induced from well-known publicly available datasets, demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art solvers for Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF) by orders of magnitude. Finally, the paper also identifies a novel family of formulas that are challenging for currently state-of- the-art QBF solvers.


Solving Explainability Queries with Quantification: The Case of Feature Relevancy

We consider the problem of partitioning $n$ agents in an undirected social network into $k$ almost equal in size (differing by at most one) groups, where the utility of an agent for a group is the number of her neighbors in the group. The core and envy-freeness are two compelling axiomatic fairness guarantees in such settings. The former demands that there be no coalition of agents such that each agent in the coalition has more utility for that coalition than for her own group, while the latter demands that no agent envy another agent for the group they are in. We provide (often tight) approximations to both fairness guarantees, and many of our positive results are obtained via efficient algorithms. 

Partitioning Friends Fairly

The problem of image aesthetic quality assessment is surprisingly difficult to define precisely. Most early work attempted to estimate the average aesthetic rating of a group of observers, while some recent work has shifted to an approach based on few-shot personalization. In this paper, we connect few-shot personalization, via Immanuel Kant's concept of disinterested judgment, to an argument from feminist aesthetics about the biased tendencies of objective standards for subjective pleasures. To empirically investigate this philosophical debate, we introduce PR-AADB, a relabeling of the existing AADB dataset with labels for pairs of images, and measure how well the existing groundtruth predicts our new pairwise labels. We find, consistent with the feminist critique, that both the existing groundtruth and few-shot personalized predictions represent some users' preferences significantly better than others, but that it is difficult to predict when and for whom the existing groundtruth will be correct. We thus advise against using benchmark datasets to evaluate models for personalized IAQA, and recommend caution when attempting to account for subjective difference using machine learning more generally.

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GANTEE: Generative Adversarial Network for Taxonomy Enterance Evaluation

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