Canada

Trained with an unprecedented scale of data, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit the emergence of significant reasoning abilities from model scaling. Such a trend underscored the potential of training LLMs with unlimited language data, advancing the development of a universal embodied agent. In this work, we introduce the NavGPT, a purely LLM-based instruction-following navigation agent, to reveal the reasoning capability of GPT models in complex embodied scenes by performing zero-shot sequential action prediction for vision-and-language navigation (VLN). At each step, NavGPT takes the textual descriptions of visual observations, navigation history, and future explorable directions as inputs to reason the agent&#39;s current status, and makes the decision to approach the target. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate NavGPT can explicitly perform high-level planning for navigation, including decomposing instruction into sub-goals, integrating commonsense knowledge relevant to navigation task resolution, identifying landmarks from observed scenes, tracking navigation progress, and adapting to exceptions with plan adjustment. Furthermore, we show that LLMs is capable of generating high-quality navigational instructions from observations and actions along a path, as well as drawing accurate top-down metric trajectory given the agent&#39;s navigation history. Despite the performance of using NavGPT to zero-shot R2R tasks still falling short of trained models, we suggest adapting multi-modality inputs for LLMs to use as visual navigation agents and applying the explicit reasoning of LLMs to benefit learning-based models. Code is available at: https://github.com/GengzeZhou/NavGPT.

AAAI 2024

NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models

vision-and-language navigation

embodied ai

## 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.

Trained with an unprecedented scale of data, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit the emergence of significant reasoning abilities from model scaling. Such a trend underscored the potential of training LLMs with unlimited language data, advancing the development of a universal embodied agent. In this work, we introduce the NavGPT, a purely LLM-based instruction-following navigation agent, to reveal the reasoning capability of GPT models in complex embodied scenes by performing zero-shot sequential action prediction for vision-and-language navigation (VLN). At each step, NavGPT takes the textual descriptions of visual observations, navigation history, and future explorable directions as inputs to reason the agent's current status, and makes the decision to approach the target. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate NavGPT can explicitly perform high-level planning for navigation, including decomposing instruction into sub-goals, integrating commonsense knowledge relevant to navigation task resolution, identifying landmarks from observed scenes, tracking navigation progress, and adapting to exceptions with plan adjustment. Furthermore, we show that LLMs is capable of generating high-quality navigational instructions from observations and actions along a path, as well as drawing accurate top-down metric trajectory given the agent's navigation history. Despite the performance of using NavGPT to zero-shot R2R tasks still falling short of trained models, we suggest adapting multi-modality inputs for LLMs to use as visual navigation agents and applying the explicit reasoning of LLMs to benefit learning-based models. Code is available at: https://github.com/GengzeZhou/NavGPT.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/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. 

Ensemble pruning that combines a subset of individual learners generated in parallel to make predictions is an important topic in ensemble learning. Past decades have developed a lot of pruning algorithms that focus on the external behavior of learners on samples, which may lead to over-fitting. In this paper, we conjecture that the generalization performance of an ensemble is not only related to its external behavior on samples but also dependent on the internal structure of individual learners. We propose the general MEPSI approach based on Kolmogorov complexity and the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, which formulates the ensemble pruning task as the two-objective optimization problem that comprises the empirical error and structural information among individual learners. We also provide a concrete implementation of MEPSI on decision trees. The theoretical results provide generalization bounds for both the general MEPSI approach and tree-based implementation. The comparative experiments conducted on multiple real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

MEPSI: An MDL-Based Ensemble Pruning Approach with Structural Information

Modeling dynamical systems is crucial for a wide range of tasks, but it remains challenging due to complex nonlinear dynamics, limited observations, or lack of prior knowledge. Recently, data-driven approaches such as Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE) have shown promising results by leveraging the expressive power of neural networks to model unknown dynamics. However, these approaches often suffer from limited labeled training data, leading to poor generalization and suboptimal predictions. On the other hand, semi-supervised algorithms can utilize abundant unlabeled data and have demonstrated  good performance in classification and regression tasks.
We propose TS-NODE, the first semi-supervised approach to modeling dynamical systems with NODE. TS-NODE explores cheaply generated synthetic pseudo rollouts to broaden exploration in the state space and to tackle the challenges brought by lack of ground-truth system data under a teacher-student model.  TS-NODE employs an unified optimization framework that corrects the teacher model based on the student's feedback while mitigating the potential false system dynamics present in pseudo rollouts.
TS-NODE demonstrates significant performance improvements over a baseline Neural ODE model on multiple dynamical system modeling tasks.

Semi-supervised Learning of Dynamical Systems with Neural Ordinary Differential Equations: A Teacher-Student Model Approach

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are promising 3D representations for scenes, objects, and humans. However, most existing methods require multi-view inputs and per-scene training, which limits their real-life applications. Moreover, current methods focus on single-subject cases, leaving scenes of interacting hands that involve severe inter-hand occlusions and challenging view variations remain unsolved. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a generalizable visibility-aware NeRF (VA-NeRF) framework for interacting hands. Specifically, given an image of interacting hands as input, our VA-NeRF first obtains a mesh-based representation of hands and extracts their corresponding geometric and textural features. Subsequently, a feature fusion module that exploits the visibility of query points and mesh vertices is introduced to adaptively merge features of both hands, enabling the recovery of features in unseen areas. Additionally, our VA-NeRF is optimized together with a novel discriminator within an adversarial learning paradigm. In contrast to conventional discriminators that predict a single real/fake label for the synthesized image, the proposed discriminator generates a pixel-wise visibility map, providing fine-grained supervision for unseen areas and encouraging the VA-NeRF to improve the visual quality of synthesized images. Experiments on the Interhand2.6M dataset demonstrate that our proposed VA-NeRF outperforms conventional NeRFs significantly. Project Page: https://github.com/XuanHuang0/VANeRF.

3D Visibility-Aware Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields for Interacting Hands

We consider the sparse contextual bandit problem where arm feature affects reward through the inner product of sparse parameters. Recent studies have developed sparsity-agnostic algorithms based on the greedy arm selection policy. However, the analysis of these algorithms requires strong assumptions on the arm feature distribution to ensure that the greedily selected samples are sufficiently diverse; One of the most common assumptions, relaxed symmetry, imposes approximate origin-symmetry on the distribution, which cannot allow distributions that has origin-asymmetric support. In this paper, we show that the greedy algorithm is applicable to a wider range of the arm feature distributions from two aspects. Firstly, we show that a mixture distribution that has a greedy-applicable component is also greedy-applicable. Second, we propose new distribution classes, related to Gaussian mixture, discrete, and radial distribution, for which the sample diversity is guaranteed. The proposed classes can describe distributions with origin-asymmetric support and, in conjunction with the first claim, provide theoretical guarantees of the greedy policy for a very wide range of the arm feature distributions.

New Classes of the Greedy-Applicable Arm Feature Distributions in the Sparse Linear Bandit Problem

Neoteric works have shown that modern deep learning models can exhibit a sparse double descent phenomenon. Indeed, as the sparsity of the model increases, the test performance first worsens since the model is overfitting the training data; then, the overfitting reduces, leading to an improvement in performance, and finally, the model begins to forget critical information, resulting in underfitting. Such a behavior prevents using traditional early stop criteria.

In this work, we have three key contributions. First, we propose a learning framework that avoids such a phenomenon and improves generalization. Second, we introduce an entropy measure providing more insights into the insurgence of this phenomenon and enabling the use of traditional stop criteria. Third, we provide a comprehensive quantitative analysis of contingent factors such as re-initialization methods, model width and depth, and dataset noise. The contributions are supported by empirical evidence in typical setups. Our code is available at https://github.com/VGCQ/DSD2.

DSD$^2$: Can We Dodge Sparse Double Descent and Compress the Neural Network Worry-Free? | VIDEO

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models show outstanding performance in generating high-quality images conditioned on textual prompts. However, they fail to semantically align the generated images with the prompts due to their limited compositional capabilities, leading to attribute leakage, entity leakage, and missing entities. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mask control strategy based on predicted object boxes to address these issues. In particular, we first train a BoxNet to predict a box for each entity that possesses the attribute specified in the prompt. Then, depending on the predicted boxes, a unique mask control is applied to the cross- and self-attention maps. Our approach produces a more semantically accurate synthesis by constraining the attention regions of each token in the prompt to the image. In addition, the proposed method is straightforward and effective and can be readily integrated into existing cross-attention-based T2I generators. We compare our approach to competing methods and demonstrate that it can faithfully convey the semantics of the original text to the generated content and achieve high availability as a ready-to-use plugin. Please refer to  https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/attention-mask-control.

Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models

Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To avoid that, one has to optimize an unknown function given only its offline evaluation at a fixed set of inputs. A naive solution to this problem is to learn a surrogate model of the unknown function and optimize this surrogate instead. However, such a naive optimizer is prone to erroneous overestimation of the surrogate (possibly due to over-fitting on a biased sample of function evaluation) on inputs outside the offline dataset. Prior approaches addressing this challenge have primarily focused on learning robust surrogate models. However, their search strategies are derived from the surrogate model rather than the actual offline data. To fill this important gap, we introduce a new learning-to-search perspective for offline optimization by reformulating it as an offline reinforcement learning problem. Our proposed policy-guided gradient search approach explicitly learns the best policy for a given surrogate model created from the offline data. Our empirical results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the learned optimization policy can be combined with existing offline surrogates to significantly improve the optimization performance.

Offline Model-Based Optimization via Policy-Guided Gradient Search

One of the prominent methods for explaining the decision of a machine-learning classifier is by a counterfactual example.
Most current algorithms for generating such examples in the textual domain are based on generative language models.  Generative models, however, are trained to minimize a specific loss function in order to fulfill certain requirements for the generated texts.  Any change in the requirements may necessitate costly retraining, thus potentially limiting their applicability.
In this paper, we present a general search-based framework for generating counterfactual explanations in the textual domain.  
Our framework is model-agnostic, domain-agnostic, anytime, and does not require retraining in order to adapt to changes in the user requirements. 
We model the task as a search problem in a space where the initial state is the classified text, and the goal state is a text in a given target class.  Our framework includes domain-independent modification operators, but can also exploit domain-specific knowledge through specialized operators. The search algorithm attempts to find a text from the target class with minimal user-specified distance from the original classified object.

A General Search-Based Framework for Generating Textual Counterfactual Explanations

Communication in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been proven to effectively promote cooperation among agents recently. Since communication in real-world scenarios is vulnerable to noises and adversarial attacks, it is crucial to develop robust communicative MARL technique. However, existing research in this domain has predominantly focused on passive defense strategies, where agents receive all messages equally, making it hard to balance performance and robustness. We propose an active defense strategy, where agents automatically reduce the impact of potentially harmful messages on the final decision. There are two challenges to implement this strategy, that are defining unreliable messages and adjusting the unreliable messages' impact on the final decision properly. To address them, we design an Active Defense Multi-Agent Communication framework (ADMAC), which estimates the reliability of received messages and adjusts their impact on the final decision accordingly with the help of a decomposable decision structure. The superiority of ADMAC over existing methods is validated by experiments in three communication-critical tasks under four types of attacks.

Robust Communicative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Active Defense | VIDEO

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive  capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might be challenging for them to perform text rewriting tasks. Most studies in the rewriting tasks focus on a particular transformation type within the boundaries of single sentences. In this work, we develop new strategies for instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to better align LLMs for cross-sentence rewriting tasks using diverse wording and structures expressed through natural languages including 1) generating rewriting instruction data from Wiki edits and public corpus through instruction generation and chain-of-thought prompting; 2) collecting comparison data for reward model training through a new ranking function. To facilitate this research, we introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines. The public repository is available on GitHub under Google Research (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/rewritelm).

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