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Reasoning is a dynamic process. In cognitive theories, the dynamics of reasoning refers to reasoning states over time after successive state transitions. Modeling the cognitive dynamics is of utmost importance to simulate human reasoning capability. In this paper, we propose to learn the reasoning dynamics of visual relational reasoning by casting it as a path routing task. We present a reinforced path routing method that represents an input image via a structured visual graph and introduces a reinforcement learning based model to explore paths (sequences of nodes) over the graph based on an input sentence to infer reasoning results. By exploring such paths, the proposed method represents reasoning states clearly and characterizes state transitions explicitly to fully model the reasoning dynamics for accurate and transparent visual relational reasoning. Extensive experiments on referring expression comprehension and visual question answering demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

AAAI 2022

Learning the Dynamics of Visual Relational Reasoning via Reinforced Path Routing

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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. 

The rapid development of facial manipulation techniques has aroused public concerns in recent years. Existing deepfake video detection approaches attempt to capture the discrim- inative features between real and fake faces based on tem- poral modelling. However, these works impose supervisions on sparsely sampled video frames but overlook the local mo- tions among adjacent frames, which instead encode rich in- consistency information that can serve as an efficient indica- tor for DeepFake video detection. To mitigate this issue, we delves into the local motion and propose a novel sampling unit named snippet which contains a few successive videos frames for local temporal inconsistency learning. Moreover, we elaborately design an Intra-Snippet Inconsistency Module (Intra-SIM) and an Inter-Snippet Interaction Module (Inter- SIM) to establish a dynamic inconsistency modelling frame- work. Specifically, the Intra-SIM applies bi-directional tem- poral difference operations and a learnable convolution ker- nel to mine the short-term motions within each snippet. The Inter-SIM is then devised to promote the cross-snippet infor- mation interaction to form global representations. The Intra- SIM and Inter-SIM work in an alternate manner and can be plugged into existing 2D CNNs. Our method outperforms the state of the art competitors on four popular benchmark dataset, i.e., FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, DFDC and Wild- Deepfake. Besides, extensive experiments and visualizations are also presented to further illustrate its effectiveness.

Delving into the local: Dynamic Inconsistency Learning for DeepFake Video Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is an essential task to understand human-centric images from a fine-grained perspective. Although end-to-end HOI detection models thrive, their paradigm of parallel human/object detection and verb class prediction loses two-stage methods' merit: object-guided hierarchy. The object in one HOI triplet gives direct clues to the verb to be predicted. In this paper, we aim to boost end-to-end models with object-guided statistical priors. Specifically, We propose to utilize a Verb Semantic Model (VSM) and use semantic aggregation to profit from this object-guided hierarchy. Similarity KL (SKL) loss is proposed to optimize VSM to align with the HOI dataset's priors. To overcome the static semantic embedding problem, we propose to generate cross-modality-aware visual and semantic features by Cross-Modal Calibration (CMC). The above modules combined composes Object-guided Cross-modal Calibration Network (OCN). Experiments conducted on two popular HOI detection benchmarks demonstrate the significance of incorporating the statistical prior knowledge and produce state-of-the-art performances. More detailed analysis indicates proposed modules serve as a stronger verb predictor and a more superior method of utilizing prior knowledge. The codes are available at https://github.com/JacobYuan7/OCN-HOI-Benchmark.

Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Object-Guided Cross-Modal Calibrated Semantics

Meta-learning models transfer the knowledge acquired from previous tasks to quickly learn new ones. They are trained on benchmarks with a fixed number of data points per task. This number is usually arbitrary and it is unknown how it affects performance at testing. Since labelling of data is expensive, finding the optimal allocation of labels across training tasks may reduce costs. Given a fixed budget of labels, should we use a small number of highly labelled tasks, or many tasks with few labels each? Should we allocate more labels to some tasks and less to others?
We show that: 1) If tasks are homogeneous, there is a uniform optimal allocation, whereby all tasks get the same amount of data; 2) At fixed budget, there is a trade-off between number of tasks and number of data points per task, with a unique solution for the optimum; 3) When trained separately, harder task should get more data, at the cost of a smaller number of tasks; 4) When training on a mixture of easy and hard tasks, more data should be allocated to easy tasks. Interestingly, Neuroscience experiments have shown that human visual skills also transfer better from easy tasks. We prove these results mathematically on mixed linear regression, and we show empirically that the same results hold for few-shot image classification on CIFAR-FS and mini-ImageNet. Our results provide guidance for allocating labels across tasks when collecting data for meta-learning.

How to Distribute Data across Tasks for Meta-Learning?

Knowledge transfer from synthetic to real data has been widely studied to mitigate data annotation constraints in various computer vision tasks such as semantic segmentation. However, the study focused on 2D images and its counterpart in 3D point clouds segmentation lags far behind due to the lack of large-scale synthetic datasets and effective transfer methods. We address this issue by collecting SynLiDAR, a large-scale synthetic LiDAR dataset that contains point-wise annotated point clouds with accurate geometric shapes and comprehensive semantic classes. SynLiDAR was collected from multiple virtual environments with rich scenes and layouts which consists of over 19 billion points of 32 semantic classes. In addition, we design PCT, a novel point cloud translator that effectively mitigates the gap between synthetic and real point clouds. Specifically, we decompose the synthetic-to-real gap into an appearance component and a sparsity component and handle them separately which improves the point cloud translation greatly. We conducted extensive experiments over three transfer learning setups including data augmentation, semi-supervised domain adaptation and unsupervised domain adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SynLiDAR provides a high-quality data source for studying 3D transfer and the proposed PCT achieves superior point cloud translation consistently across the three setups.  The dataset is available at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/SynLiDAR.

Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real LiDAR Point Cloud for Semantic Segmentation

In bounded-suboptimal heuristic search, one attempts to find a solution that costs no more than a prespecified factor of optimal as quickly as possible. This is an important setting, as it admits faster-than-optimal solving while retaining some control over solution cost. In this paper, we investigate several new algorithms for bounded-suboptimal search, including novel variants of EES and DPS, the two most prominent previous proposals, and methods inspired by recent work in bounded-cost search that leverages uncertainty estimates of the heuristic. We perform what is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive empirical comparison of bounded-suboptimal search algorithms to date, including both search and planning benchmarks, and we find that one of the new algorithms, a simple alternating queue scheme, significantly outperforms previous work.

New Results in Bounded-Suboptimal Search

Domain adaptation aims to leverage source domain knowledge to predict target domain labels. Most domain adaptation methods tackle a single-source, single-target scenario, whereas source and target domain data can often be subdivided into data from different distributions in real-life applications (e.g., when the distribution of the collected data changes with time). However, such subdomains are rarely given and should be discovered automatically. 
 To this end, some recent domain adaptation works seek separations of hidden subdomains, w.r.t. a known or fixed number of subdomains. 
 In contrast, this paper introduces a new subdomain combination method that leverages a variable number of subdomains. 
 Precisely, we propose to use an inter-subdomain divergence maximization criterion to exploit hidden subdomains. 
 Besides, our proposition stands in a target-to-source domain adaptation scenario, where one exploits a pre-trained source model as a black box; thus, the proposed method is model-agnostic.
 By providing interpretability at two complementary levels (transformation and subdomain levels), our method can also be easily interpreted by practitioners with or without machine learning backgrounds.
 Experimental results over two fraud detection datasets demonstrate the efficiency of our method.

Interpretable Domain Adaptation for Hidden Subdomain Alignment in the Context of Pre-Trained Source Models

Recently, Transformers have shown promising performance in various vision tasks. To reduce the quadratic computation complexity caused by the global self-attention, various methods constrain the range of attention within a local region to improve its efficiency. Consequently, their receptive fields in a single attention layer are not large enough, resulting in insufficient context modeling. To address this issue, we propose a Pale-Shaped self-Attention (PS-Attention), which performs self-attention within a pale-shaped region. Compared to the global self-attention, PS-Attention can reduce the computation and memory costs significantly. Meanwhile, it can capture richer contextual information under the similar computation complexity with previous local self-attention mechanisms. Based on the PS-Attention, we develop a general Vision Transformer backbone with a hierarchical architecture, named Pale Transformer, which achieves 83.4%, 84.3%, and 84.9% Top-1 accuracy with the model size of 22M, 48M, and 85M respectively for 224x224 ImageNet-1K classification, outperforming the previous Vision Transformer backbones. For downstream tasks, our Pale Transformer backbone performs better than the recent state-of-the-art CSWin Transformer by a large margin on ADE20K semantic segmentation and COCO object detection & instance segmentation. The code will be released on https://github.com/BR-IDL/PaddleViT.

Pale Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Pale-Shaped Attention

Dynamic convolution has achieved significant gain in performance and computational complexity, thanks to its powerful representation capability given limited filter number/layers.
 However, SOTA dynamic convolution operators are sensitive to input noises (e.g., Gaussian noise, shot noise, e.t.c.) and lack sufficient spatial contextual information in filter generation.
 To alleviate this inherent weakness, we propose a lightweight and heterogeneous-structure (i.e., static and dynamic) operator, named Bi-volution.
 On the one hand, Bi-volution is designed as a dual-branch structure to fully leverage complementary properties of static/dynamic convolution, which endows Bi-volution more robust properties and higher performance.
 On the other hand, the Spatial Augmented Kernel Generation module is proposed to improve the dynamic convolution, realizing the learning of spatial context information with negligible additional computational complexity.
 Extensive experiments illustrate that the ResNet-50 equipped with Bi-volution achieves a highly competitive boost in performance (+2.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification, +2.4% box AP and +2.2% mask AP on COCO detection and instance segmentation) while maintaining extremely low FLOPs (i.e., ResNet50@2.7 GFLOPs). Furthermore, our Bi-volution shows better robustness than dynamic convolution against various noise and input corruptions. Our code is available at https://github.com/neuralchen/Bivolution.

Bivolution: A Static and Dynamic Coupled Filter

Symbolic search, using Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to represent sets of states, is a competitive approach to optimal planning. Yet heuristic search in this context remains challenging. The many advances on admissible planning heuristics are not directly applicable, as they evaluate one state at a time. Indeed, progress using heuristic functions in symbolic search has been limited and even very informed heuristics have been shown to be detrimental. Here we show how this connection can be made stronger for LP-based potential heuristics. Our key observation is that, for this family of heuristic functions, the change of heuristic value induced by each operator can be precomputed. This facilitates their smooth integration into symbolic search. Our experiments show that this can pay off significantly: we establish a new state of the art in optimal symbolic planning.

Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search

Image-text matching bridges vision and language, which is a crucial task in the field of multi-modal intelligence. The key challenge lies in how to measure image-text relevance accurately as matching evidence. Most existing works aggregate the local semantic similarities of matched region-word pairs as the overall relevance, and they typically assume that the matched pairs are equally reliable. However, although a region-word pair is locally matched across modalities, it may be inconsistent/unreliable from the global perspective of image-text, resulting in inaccurate relevance measurement. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Confidence-Aware Network to infer the matching confidence that indicates the reliability of matched region-word pairs, which is combined with the local semantic similarities to refine the relevance measurement. Specifically, we first calculate the matching confidence via the relevance between the semantic of image regions and the complete described semantic in the image, with the text as a bridge. Further, to richly express the region semantics, we extend the region to its visual context in the image. Then, local semantic similarities are weighted with the inferred confidence to filter out unreliable matched pairs in aggregating. Comprehensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks Flickr30K and MSCOCO.

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