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Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results.In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes of this problem: (1) The ELBO objective cannot utilize the label information directly. (2) A bottleneck value exists, and continuing to optimize ELBO after this value will not improve inference accuracy. On the basis of the experiment results, we propose SHOT-VAE to address these problems without introducing additional prior knowledge. The SHOT-VAE offers two contributions: (1) A new ELBO approximation named smooth-ELBO that integrates the label predictive loss into ELBO. (2) An approximation based on optimal interpolation that breaks the ELBO value bottleneck by reducing the margin between ELBO and the data likelihood. The SHOT-VAE achieves good performance with 25.30% error rate on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels and reduces the error rate to 6.11% on CIFAR-10 with 4k labels.

AAAI 2021

SHOT-VAE: Semi-Supervised Deep Generative Models with Label-Aware ELBO Approximations

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. <br>
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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

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Chest X-rays are an important and accessible clinical imaging tool for the detection of many thoracic diseases. Over the past decade, deep learning, with a focus on the convolutional neural network (CNN), has become the most powerful computer-aided diagnosis technology for improving disease identification performance. However, training an effective and robust deep CNN usually requires a large amount of data with high annotation quality. For chest X-ray imaging, annotating large-scale data requires professional domain knowledge and is time-consuming. Thus, existing public chest X-ray datasets usually adopt language pattern based methods to automatically mine labels from reports. However, this results in label uncertainty and inconsistency. In this paper, we propose many-to-one distribution learning (MODL) and K-nearest neighbor smoothing (KNNS) methods from two perspectives to improve a single model's disease identification performance, rather than focusing on an ensemble of models. MODL integrates multiple models to obtain a soft label distribution for optimizing the single target model, which can reduce the effects of original label uncertainty. Moreover, KNNS aims to enhance the robustness of the target model to provide consistent predictions on images with similar medical findings. Extensive experiments on the public NIH Chest X-ray and CheXpert datasets show that our model achieves consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

Many-to-One Distribution Learning and K-Nearest Neighbor Smoothing for Thoracic Disease Identification

Online hashing for streaming data has attracted increasing attention recently. However, most existing algorithms focus on batch inputs and instance-balanced optimization, which is limited in the single datum input case and does not match the dynamic training in online hashing. Furthermore, constantly updating the online model with new-coming samples will inevitably lead to the catastrophic forgetting problem. In this paper, we propose a novel online hashing method to handle the above-mentioned issues jointly, termed Asynchronus Teacher-Guided Bit-wise Hard Mining for Online Hashing. Firstly, to meet the needs of datum-wise online hashing, we design a novel binary codebook that is discriminative to separate different classes. Secondly, we propose a novel semantic loss (termed bit-wise attention loss) to dynamically focus on hard samples of each bit during training. Last but not least, we design a asynchronous knowledge distillation scheme to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem, where the teacher model is delaying updated to maintain the old knowledge, guiding the student model learning. Extensive experiments conducted on two public benchmarks demonstrate the favorable performance of our method over the state-of-the-arts.

Asynchronous Teacher Guided Bit-wise Hard Mining for Online Hashing

Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. In the real VFL applications, usually only one or partial parties hold labels, which makes it challenging for all parties to collaboratively learn the model without privacy leakage. Meanwhile, most existing VFL algorithms are trapped in the synchronous computations, which leads to inefficiency in their real-world applications. To address these challenging problems, we propose a novel VFL framework integrated with new backward updating mechanism and bilevel asynchronous parallel architecture (VFB^2), under which three new algorithms, including VFB^2-SGD, -SVRG, and -SAGA, are proposed. We derive the theoretical results of the convergence rates of these three algorithms under both strongly convex and nonconvex conditions. We also prove the security of VFB^2 under semi-honest threat models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable, and lossless.

Secure Bilevel Asynchronous Vertical Federated Learning with Backward Updating

Feature interactions are essential for achieving high accuracy in recommender systems. Many studies take into account the interaction between every pair of features. However, this is suboptimal because some feature interactions may not be that relevant to the recommendation result and taking them into account may introduce noise and decrease recommendation accuracy. To make the best out of feature interactions, we propose a graph neural network approach to effectively model them, together with a novel technique to automatically detect those feature interactions that are beneficial in terms of recommendation accuracy. The automatic feature interaction detection is achieved via edge prediction with an L0 activation regularization. Our proposed model is proved to be effective through the information bottleneck principle and statistical interaction theory. Experimental results show that our model (i) outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, and (ii) automatically identifies beneficial feature interactions.

Detecting Beneficial Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems

Deep quantization methods have shown high efficiency on large-scale image retrieval. However, current models heavily rely on ground-truth information, hindering the application of quantization in label-hungry scenarios. A more realistic demand is to learn from inexhaustible uploaded images that are associated with informal tags provided by amateur users. Though such sketchy tags do not obviously reveal the labels, they actually contain useful semantic information for supervising deep quantization. To this end, we propose Weakly-Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization (WSDHQ), which is the first work to learn deep quantization from weakly tagged images. Specifically, 1) we use word embeddings to represent the tags and enhance their semantic information based on a tag correlation graph. 2) To better preserve semantic information in quantization codes and reduce quantization error, we jointly learn semantics-preserving embeddings and supervised quantizer on hypersphere by employing a well-designed fusion layer and tailor-made loss functions. Extensive experiments show that WSDHQ can achieve state-of-art performance in weakly-supervised compact coding.

Weakly Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization for Image Retrieval

In active learning, the ignorance of aligning unlabeled samples' distribution with that of labeled samples hinders the model trained upon labeled samples from selecting informative unlabeled samples. In this paper, we propose an agreement-discrepancy-selection (ADS) approach, and target at unifying distribution alignment with sample selection by introducing adversarial classifiers to the convolutional neural network (CNN). Minimizing classifiers' prediction discrepancy (maximizing prediction agreement) drives learning CNN features to reduce the distribution bias of labeled and unlabeled samples, while maximizing classifiers' discrepancy highlights informative samples. Iterative optimization of agreement and discrepancy loss calibrated with an entropy function drives aligning sample distributions in a progressive fashion for effective active learning. Experiments on image classification and object detection tasks demonstrate that ADS is task-agnostic, while significantly outperforms the previous methods when the labeled sets are small.

Agreement-Discrepancy-Selection: Active Learning with Progressive Distribution Alignment

Recent researches on information theory shed new light on the continuous attempts to open the black box of neural signal encoding. Inspired by the problem of lossy signal compression for wireless communication, this paper presents a Bitwise Bottleneck approach for quantizing and encoding neural network activations. Based on the rate-distortion theory, the Bitwise Bottleneck attempts to determine the most significant bits in activation representation by assigning and approximating the sparse coefficients associated with different bits. Given the constraint of a limited average code rate, the bottleneck minimizes the distortion for optimal activation quantization in a flexible layer-by-layer manner. Experiments over ImageNet and other datasets show that, by minimizing the quantization distortion of each layer, the neural network with bottlenecks achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy with low-precision activation. Meanwhile, by reducing the code rate, the proposed method can improve the memory and computational efficiency by over six times compared with the deep neural network with standard single-precision representation. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/CQUlearningsystemgroup/BitwiseBottleneck.

Optimizing Information Theory Based Bitwise Bottlenecks for Efficient Mixed-Precision Activation Quantization

Self-Supervised monocular visual odometry (VO) is often cast into a view synthesis problem based on depth and camera pose estimation. One of the key challenges is to accurately and robustly estimate depth with occlusions and moving objects in the scene. Existing methods simply detect and mask out regions of occlusions locally by several convolutional layers, and then perform only partial view synthesis in the rest of the image. However, occlusion and moving object detection is an unsolved problem itself which requires global layout information. Inaccurate detection inevitably results in incorrect depth as well as pose estimation. In this work, instead of locally detecting and masking out occlusions and moving objects, we propose to alleviate their negative effects on monocular VO implicitly but more effectively from two global perspectives. First, a multi-scale non-local attention module, consisting of both intra-stage augmented attention and cascaded across-stage attention, is proposed for robust depth estimation given occlusions, alleviating the impacts of occlusions via global attention modeling. Second, adversarial learning is introduced in view synthesis for monocular VO. Unlike existing methods that use pixel-level losses on the quality of synthesized views, we enforce the synthetic view to be indistinguishable from the real one at the scene-level. Such a global constraint again helps cope with occluded and moving regions. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art in both pose estimation and depth recovery.

A Global Occlusion-Aware Approach to Self-Supervised Monocular Visual Odometry

This paper proposes a spatiotemporal deep learning framework, Trajectory-based Graph Neural Network (TrGNN), that mines the underlying causality of flows from historical vehicle trajectories and incorporates that into road traffic prediction. The vehicle trajectory transition patterns are studied to explicitly model the spatial traffic demand via graph propagation along the road network; an attention mechanism is designed to learn the temporal dependencies based on neighborhood traffic status; and finally, a fusion of multi-step prediction is integrated into the graph neural network design. The proposed approach is evaluated with a real-world trajectory dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed TrGNN model achieves over 5% error reduction when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches across all metrics for normal traffic, and up to 14% for atypical traffic during peak hours or abnormal events. The advantage of trajectory transitions especially manifest itself in inferring high fluctuation of flows as well as non-recurrent flow patterns.

Traffic Flow Prediction with Vehicle Trajectories

This paper tackles the purely unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) problem that requires no annotations. Some previous methods adopt clustering techniques to generate pseudo labels and use the produced labels to train Re-ID models progressively. These methods are relatively simple but effective. However, most clustering-based methods take each cluster as a pseudo identity class, neglecting the large intra-ID variance caused mainly by the change of camera views. To address this issue, we propose to split each single cluster into multiple proxies and each proxy represents the instances coming from the same camera. These camera-aware proxies enable us to deal with large intra-ID variance and generate more reliable pseudo labels for learning. Based on the camera-aware proxies, we design both intra and inter-camera contrastive learning components for our Re-ID model to effectively learn the ID discrimination ability within and across cameras. Meanwhile, a proxy-balanced sampling strategy is also designed, which facilitates our learning further. Extensive experiments on three large-scale Re-ID datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms most unsupervised methods by a significant margin. Especially, on the challenging MSMT17 dataset, we gain 14.3 percent Rank-1 and 10.2 percent mAP improvements when compared to the second place. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/CAP-master.

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