Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The rapid development of large-scale deep learning models questions the affordability of hardware platforms, which necessitates the pruning to reduce their computational and memory footprints. Sparse neural networks as the product, have demonstrated numerous favorable benefits like low complexity, undamaged generalization, etc. Most of the prominent pruning strategies are invented from a model-centric perspective, focusing on searching and preserving crucial weights by analyzing network topologies. However, the role of data and its interplay with model-centric pruning has remained relatively unexplored. In this research, we introduce a novel data-model co-design perspective: to promote superior weight sparsity by learning important model topology and adequate input data in a synergetic manner. Specifically, customized Visual Prompts are mounted to upgrade neural Network sparsification in our proposed VPNs framework. As a pioneering effort, this paper conducts systematic investigations about the impact of different visual prompts on model pruning and suggests an effective joint optimization approach. Extensive experiments with 3 network architectures and 8 datasets evidence the substantial performance improvements from VPNs over existing start-of-the-art pruning algorithms. Furthermore, we find that subnetworks discovered by VPNs from pre-trained models enjoy better transferability across diverse downstream scenarios. These insights shed light on new promising possibilities of data-model co-designs for vision model sparsification.

Visual prompting has gained popularity as a method for adapting pre-trained models to specific tasks, particularly in the realm of parameter-efficient tuning. However, existing visual prompting techniques often pad the prompt parameters around the image, limiting the interaction between the visual prompts and the original image to a small set of patches while neglecting the inductive bias present in shared information across different patches. In this study, we conduct a thorough preliminary investigation to identify and address these limitations. We propose a novel visual prompt design, introducing **Lo**w-**R**ank matrix multiplication for **V**isual **P**rompting (LoR-VP), which enables shared and patch-specific information across rows and columns of image pixels. Extensive experiments across seven network architectures and four datasets demonstrate significant improvements in both performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art visual prompting methods, achieving up to $6\times$ faster training times, utilizing $18\times$ fewer visual prompt parameters, and delivering a 3.1% improvement in performance.

Identifying the most representative subset for a close-to-submodular objective while satisfying the predefined partition constraint is a fundamental task with numerous applications in machine learning. However, the existing distorted local-search methods are often hindered by their prohibitive query complexities and the rigid requirement for prior knowledge of difficult-to-obtain structural parameters. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel algorithm titled **Multinoulli-SCG**, which not only is parameter-free, but also can achieve the same approximation guarantees as the distorted local-search methods with significantly fewer function evaluations. The core of our **Multinoulli-SCG** algorithm is an innovative continuous-relaxation framework named Multinoulli Extension(***ME***), which can effectively convert the discrete subset selection problem subject to partition constraints into a solvable continuous maximization focused on learning the optimal multinoulli priors across the considered partition. In sharp contrast with the well-established multi-linear extension for submodular subset selection, a notable advantage of our proposed ***ME*** is its intrinsic capacity to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function. Finally, we validate the practical efficacy of our proposed algorithms by applying them to video summarization, bayesian A-optimal design and coverage maximization.

Spatial intelligence is fundamental to AI systems that interact with the physical world, particularly in 3D scene generation and spatial comprehension. Current layout generation in 3D scene synthesis remains highly complex, often constrained by predefined datasets and limited dynamic adaptation to changing spatial relationships. In this paper, we propose GraphCanvas3D, a flexible, query-driven framework for controllable 3D scene generation. Unlike traditional methods that require retraining and predefined input masks for modifications, GraphCanvas3D provides a training-free solution supporting the generation of diverse scenes-both indoor and outdoor-through free manipulation of objects and scene elements. Our framework employs hierarchical, graph-driven scene descriptions, representing spatial elements as graph nodes and establishing coherent relationships among objects in 3D environments. The decoupled object representation enables flexible, on-the-fly scene adjustments and dynamic, customizable scene creation. Experimental results and user studies demonstrate that GraphCanvas3D improves usability, adaptability, and generalization across various 3D scene generation tasks, offering a powerful tool for scalable and diverse scene synthesis.

In this paper, we present two effective policy learning algorithms for multi-agent online coordination(MA-OC) problem. The first one, **MA-SPL**, not only can achieve the optimal $(1-\frac{c}{e})$-approximation guarantee for the MA-OC problem with submodular objectives but also can handle the unexplored $\alpha$-weakly DR-submodular and $(\gamma,\beta)$-weakly submodular scenarios, where $c$ is the curvature of the investigated submodular functions, $\alpha$ denotes the diminishing-return(DR) ratio and the tuple$(\gamma,\beta)$ represents the submodularity ratios. Subsequently, in order to reduce the reliance on the unknown parameters $\alpha,\gamma,\beta$ inherent in the **MA-SPL** algorithm, we then introduce the second online algorithm named **MA-MPL**. This **MA-MPL** algorithm is entirely *parameter-free* and simultaneously can maintain the same approximation ratio as the first **MA-SPL** algorithm. The core of our **MA-SPL** and **MA-MPL** algorithms is a novel continuous-relaxation technique term as policy-based continuous extension. Compared with the well-established multi-linear extension, a notable advantage of this new policy-based continuous extension is its ability to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function, thereby enabling us to tackle the challenging weakly submodular objective functions. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

Voice control has become an indispensable interaction method in smart devices. Compared to traditional microphones, mm Wave radar offers a promising solution for speech sensing in noisy environments. However, most current research relies on single-view information, such as vocal cord vibrations or lip movements, to classify speech, which overlooks important details like timbre, speech rate, and intonation, limiting the application of speech sensing. To address these issues, we develop a high-quality speech sensing method based on mm Wave radar, named SpDiff. This method accurately localizes the vocalizing target and, based on the human vocal mechanism, extracts multi-view speech features according to the movement characteristics of the vocal cords, lips, and face. Additionally, to generate high-quality speech signals, we design a conditional latent diffusion model (CLDM), which uses multi-view radar information as conditional guidance, accurately capturing the complex mapping relationships between radar and speech signal distributions. To evaluate the SpDiff method, we build a mmWave system using IWR1443Boost and recruit 14 volunteers to construct a dataset. Experimental results show that SpDiff achieves high standards in speech sensing, with the generated speech directly input into existing recognition models, achieving an average character and word error rate (CER/WER) of only 2.33% and 3.05%.

Generalization remains a central challenge in machine learning. In this work, we propose *Learning from Teaching* (**LoT**), a novel regularization technique for deep neural networks to enhance generalization. Inspired by the human ability to capture concise and abstract patterns, we hypothesize that generalizable correlations are expected to be easier to imitate. LoT operationalizes this concept to improve the generalization of the main model with auxiliary student learners. The student learners are trained by the main model and, in turn, provide feedback to help the main model capture more generalizable and imitable correlations. Our experimental results across several domains, including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and methodologies like Reinforcement Learning, demonstrate that the introduction of LoT brings significant benefits compared to training models on the original dataset. The results suggest the effectiveness and efficiency of LoT in identifying generalizable information at the right scales while discarding spurious data correlations, thus making LoT a valuable addition to current machine learning. Code is available at https://github.com/jincan333/LoT.

Using mmWave radar to conduct gesture recognition is a promising solution for human-computer interaction. Although many studies have shown initial success, two-fold problems still remain unsolved, namely, the high-strength human activity interference and the difficulty in handling similar gestures. In light of these, we develop a robust mmWave radar based gesture recognition system, Rodar, to achieve accurate recognition of similar gestures under high-strength human activity interference, where a Multi-view De-interference Transformer (MvDeFormer) network is proposed. Specifically, to deal with the strong human activity interference, we design a DeFormer module to capture the useful gesture features by learning different patterns between gestures and interference, thereby reducing the impact of interference. Then, we develop a hierarchical multi-view fusion module to first extract the enhanced features within each view, and effectively fuse them across various views for final recognition. To evaluate the proposed Rodar system, we construct a dataset with seven similar gestures under three common human activity interference scenarios. Experimental results show that the accuracy can achieve up to 93.01%. The code implementations are available athttps://github.com/Xlab2024/MvDeFormer.