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首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.70ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

CachePrune: Teaching LLMs What Not to Follow via KV-Cache Editing

Rui Wang Adobe Systems, Junda Wu University of California, San Diego, Yu Xia University of California, San Diego, Tong Yu Adobe Research, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Subrata Mitra Adobe Systems, Lina Yao University of New South Wales 等 9 位作者

原文摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to indirect prompt injection attack, where the model inadvertently responds to instructions injected into the prompt context. This vulnerability stems from LLMs’ inability to distinguish between data and instructions within a prompt. We propose CachePrune that defends against this attack by identifying and pruning neurons associated with instruction-following, during KV cache encoding of the prompt context. The pruning steers the LLM toward interpreting the context purely as data rather than as instructions to follow. To identify these neurons, we introduce a neural attribution mechanism guided by a preferential attribution loss, and theoretically connect this loss to an upper bound of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) objective. Further, we improve on the fidelity of neural attribution by leveraging an observed triggering effect in instruction-following. Our approach does not interfere with prompt formatting or incur test-time overhead in response generation. Experiments show that CachePrune significantly reduces the attack success rate while preserving the LLM’s ability to follow user instructions.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.700ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

MetFuse: Figurative Fusion between Metonymy and Metaphor

Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu Jiang University of Cincinnati

原文摘要

Metonymy and metaphor often co-occur in natural language, yet computational work has studied them largely in isolation. We introduce a framework that transforms a literal sentence into three figurative variants: metonymic, metaphoric, and hybrid. Using this framework, we construct MetFuse, the first dedicated dataset of figurative fusion between metonymy and metaphor, containing 1,000 human-verified meaning-aligned quadruplets totaling 4,000 sentences. Extrinsic experiments on eight existing benchmarks show that augmenting training data with MetFuse consistently improves both metonymy and metaphor classification, with hybrid examples yielding the largest gains on metonymy tasks. Using this dataset, we also analyze how the presence of one figurative type impacts another. Our findings show that both human annotators and large language models better identify metonymy in hybrid sentences than in metonymy-only sentences, demonstrating that the presence of a metaphor makes a metonymic noun more explicit.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.701ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Adaptive Constraint Propagation: Scaling Structured Inference for Large Language Models via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Ibne Farabi Shihab Amazon, Sanjeda Akter Iowa State University, Anuj Sharma Iowa State University

原文摘要

Large language models increasingly require structured inference, from enforcing JSON schema to multilingual parsing, where outputs must satisfy complex constraints. We introduce MetaJuLS, a meta-reinforcement learning approach that learns universal constraint propagation policies applicable across languages and tasks without task-specific retraining. By formulating structured inference as adaptive constraint propagation and training a Graph Attention Network with meta-learning, MetaJuLS achieves 1.5-2.0× speedups over GPU-optimized baselines while maintaining an accuracy within 0.2% of that of state-of-the-art parsers. On Universal Dependencies across 10 languages and LLM-constrained generation (LogicBench, GSM8K-Constrained), MetaJuLS demonstrates rapid cross-domain adaptation: a policy trained on English parsing adapts to new languages and tasks with 5–10 gradient steps (5–15 seconds) rather than requiring hours of task-specific training. Mechanistic analysis reveals that the policy employs human-like parsing strategies (easy-first) and novel, non-intuitive heuristics. By reducing the number of propagation steps in LLM deployments, MetaJuLS contributes to Green AI by directly reducing the inference carbon footprint.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.702ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Juntong Ni, Shiyu Wang ByteDance Inc., Qi He, Ming Jin Griffith University, Wei Jin Emory University

原文摘要

Spatio-temporal reasoning in time series involves the explicit synthesis of temporal dynamics, spatial dependencies, and textual context. This capability is vital for high-stakes decision-making in systems such as traffic networks, power grids, and disease propagation. However, the field remains underdeveloped because most existing works prioritize predictive accuracy over reasoning. To address the gap, we introduce ST-Bench, a benchmark consisting of four core tasks, including etiological reasoning, entity identification, correlation reasoning, and in-context forecasting, developed via a network SDE-based multi-agent data synthesis pipeline. We then propose STReasoner, a model that integrates time series, graph structure, and text for explicit reasoning. To promote spatially grounded logic, we introduce S-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that rewards performance gains specifically attributable to spatial information. Experiments show that STReasoner achieves average accuracy gains between 17% and 135% at only 0.004x the cost of proprietary models and generalizes robustly to real-world data.

cs.CL · cs.MA

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.703ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

When Vision-Language Models Judge Without Seeing: Exposing Informativeness Bias

Xiaohan Zou, Roshan Sridhar Oracle, Mohammadtaher Safarzadeh Oracle, Dan Roth

原文摘要

The reliability of VLM-as-a-Judge is critical for the automatic evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs). Despite recent progress, our analysis reveals that VLM-as-a-Judge often pays limited attention to the image when making decisions. Instead, they often blindly favor the more informative answer, even when they can recognize it conflicts with the image content. We call this problem informativeness bias, which significantly undermines judge reliability. To address it, we propose BIRCH (Balanced Informativeness and CoRrectness with a Truthful AnCHor), a judging paradigm that first corrects inconsistencies with the image content in candidate answers, and then compares the answers against this corrected version. This shifts the judge’s focus from informativeness to image-grounded correctness. Experiments on multiple models and benchmarks show that BIRCH reduces informativeness bias by up to 17%, resulting in performance gains of up to 9.8%. Our work reveals an overlooked but fundamental flaw in current VLM-as-a-Judge systems and highlights the need for more principled designs.

cs.CL · cs.CV

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.704ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Hallucination Detection in LLMs with Topological Divergence on Attention Graphs

Alexandra Bazarova Applied AI Institute, Andrei Volodichev Applied AI Institute, Aleksandr Yugay Applied AI Institute, Andrey Shulga Applied AI Institute, Alina Ermilova University of Sharjah and Applied AI Institute, Konstantin Polev SB AI Lab, Julia Belikova, Rauf Parchiev 等 13 位作者

原文摘要

Hallucinations remain a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) settings where models may generate outputs unsupported by the provided context. To address this, we introduce TOHA, a TOpology-based HAllucination detector, which leverages a topological divergence metric to quantify the structural properties of graphs induced by attention matrices. Examining the topological divergence between prompt and response subgraphs in RAG settings reveals consistent patterns: higher divergence values in specific attention heads correlate with unfaithful outputs, independent of the dataset. Extensive experiments — including evaluations on question answering and summarization tasks — show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on several benchmarks while requiring minimal annotated data and computational resources. Our findings indicate that the topological structure of attention matrices provides an efficient and robust metric for assessing the correctness of LLM’s responses.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.705ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens

Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu Jiang University of Cincinnati

原文摘要

Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word’s concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs. figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction that is consistent across models. Finally, we show this geometric structure is practically useful: a single concreteness direction supports efficient figurative-language classification and enables training-free steering of generation toward more literal or more figurative rewrites.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.706ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Mediocrity is the key for LLM as a Judge Anchor Selection

Shachar Don-Yehiya Hebrew University of Jerusalem and International Business Machines, Asaf Yehudai International Business Machines, Leshem Choshen Massachusetts Institute of Technology and International Business Machines, Omri Abend Hebrew University of Jerusalem

原文摘要

The “LLM-as-a-judge” paradigm has become a standard method for evaluating open-ended generation. To address the quadratic scalability costs of pairwise comparisons, popular benchmarks like Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval compare all models against a single anchor. However, despite its widespread use, the impact of anchor selection on the reliability of the results remains largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate the effect of anchor selection by evaluating 22 different anchors on the Arena-Hard-v2.0 dataset. We find that the choice of anchor is critical: a poor anchor can dramatically reduce correlation with human rankings. We identify that common anchor choices (best-performing and worst-performing models) make poor anchors. Because these extreme anchors are consistently better or worse than all other models, they are seldom indicative of the relative ranking of the models. We further quantify the effect size of anchor selection, showing it is comparable to the selection of a judge model. We conclude with actionable recommendations. First, we conduct a power analysis, and compute sufficient benchmark sizes for anchor-based evaluation, finding that standard benchmark sizes are insufficient for pairwise evaluation and fail to distinguish between competitive models reliably. Second, we provide guidelines for selecting informative anchors to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation practices.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.707ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

When "Correct" Is Not Safe: Can We Trust Functionally Correct Patches Generated by Code Agents?

Yibo Peng, James Song, Lei Li, Xinyu Yang Carnegie Mellon University, Mihai Christodorescu Google, Ravi Mangal Colorado State University, Corina Pasareanu, Haizhong Zheng CMU, Carnegie Mellon University 等 9 位作者

原文摘要

Code agents are increasingly trusted to autonomously fix bugs on platforms such as GitHub, yet their security evaluation focuses almost exclusively on functional correctness. In this paper, we reveal a novel type of threat to real-world code-agents: functionally correct yet vulnerable (FCV) patches, which pass all test cases but contain vulnerable code. With our proposed FCV-Attack, we demonstrate that SOTA LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT and Claude) and agent scaffolds (e.g., SWE-agent and OpenHands) are all vulnerable to this FCV threat; across 12 agent-model combinations on SWE-Bench, the attack only requires black-box access and a single query to the code agent to perform the attack. For example, for CWE-538 (information exposure vulnerability), the FCV-Attack attains an attack success rate of 40.7% on GPT-5 Mini + OpenHands. Our results reveal an important security threat overlooked by current evaluation paradigms and urge the development of security-aware defenses for code agents.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.708ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

CoG: Controllable Graph Reasoning via Relational Blueprints and Failure-Aware Refinement over Knowledge Graphs

Yuanxiang Liu, Songze Li, Xiaoke Guo, Zhaoyan Gong, Qifei Zhang, Huajun Chen Zhejiang University and ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center, Wen Zhang Zhejiang University

原文摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities but often grapple with reliability challenges like hallucinations. While Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer explicit grounding, existing paradigms of KG-augmented LLMs typically exhibit cognitive rigidity—applying homogeneous search strategies that render them vulnerable to instability under neighborhood noise and structural misalignment leading to reasoning stagnation. To address these challenges, we propose CoG, a training-free framework inspired by Dual-Process Theory that mimics the interplay between intuition and deliberation. First, functioning as the fast, intuitive process, the Relational Blueprint Guidance module leverages relational blueprints as interpretable soft structural constraints to rapidly stabilize the search direction against noise. Second, functioning as the prudent, analytical process, the Failure-Aware Refinement module intervenes upon encountering reasoning impasses. It triggers evidence-conditioned reflection and executes controlled backtracking to overcome reasoning stagnation. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate that CoG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and efficiency.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.709ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Latent Agents: A Post-Training Procedure for Internalized Multi-Agent Debate

John Seon Keun Yi Boston University, Boston University, Aaron Mueller Boston University, Dokyun Lee Boston University, Boston University

原文摘要

Multi-agent debate has been shown to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, it is compute-intensive, requiring generation of long transcripts before answering questions. To address this inefficiency, we develop a framework that distills multi-agent debate into a single LLM through a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline combining debate structure learning with internalization via dynamic reward scheduling and length clipping. Across multiple models and benchmarks, our internalized models match or exceed explicit multi-agent debate performance using up to 93% fewer tokens. We then investigate the mechanistic basis of this capability through activation steering, finding that internalization creates agent-specific subspaces: interpretable directions in activation space corresponding to different agent perspectives. We further demonstrate a practical application: by instilling malicious agents into the LLM through internalized debate, then applying negative steering to suppress them, we show that distillation makes harmful behaviors easier to localize and control with smaller reductions in general performance compared to steering base models. Our findings offer a new perspective for understanding multi-agent capabilities in distilled models and provide practical guidelines for controlling internalized reasoning behaviors.

cs.CL · cs.MA

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.71ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Flip-Flop Consistency: Unsupervised Training for Robustness to Prompt Perturbations in LLMs

Parsa Hejabi, Elnaz Rahmati, Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari, Morteza Dehghani University of Southern California

原文摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce inconsistent answers when faced with different phrasings of the same prompt. In this paper, we propose Flip-Flop Consistency (F^2C), an unsupervised training method that improves robustness to such perturbations. F^2C is composed of two key components. The first, Consensus Cross-Entropy (CCE), uses a majority vote across prompt variations to create a hard pseudo-label. The second is a representation alignment loss that pulls lower-confidence and non-majority predictors toward the consensus established by high-confidence, majority-voting variations. We evaluate our method on 11 datasets spanning four NLP tasks, with 4–15 prompt variations per dataset. On average, F^2C raises observed agreement by 11.62%, improves mean F_1 by 8.94%, and reduces performance variance across formats by 3.29%. In out-of-domain evaluations, F^2C generalizes effectively, increasing \overline{F_1} and agreement while decreasing variance across most source-target pairs. Finally, when trained on only a subset of prompt perturbations and evaluated on held-out formats, F^2C consistently improves both performance and agreement while reducing variance. These findings highlight F^2C as an effective unsupervised method for enhancing LLM consistency, performance, and generalization under prompt perturbations.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.710ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity

Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Xiong Liu Alibaba Group, Jing Ye Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ziqiang Liu 等 13 位作者

原文摘要

Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.711ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

To Think or Not to Think: The Hidden Cost of Meta-Training with Excessive CoT Examples

Vignesh Kothapalli Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ata Fatahibaarzi LinkedIn, Hamed Firooz Meta, Maziar Sanjabi LinkedIn

原文摘要

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has unlocked significant reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, ICL with CoT examples is ineffective on novel tasks when the pre-training knowledge is insufficient. We study this problem in a controlled setting using the CoT-ICL Lab framework, and propose meta-training techniques to learn novel abstract reasoning tasks in-context. Although CoT examples facilitate reasoning, we noticed that their excessive inclusion during meta-training degrades performance when CoT supervision is limited. To mitigate such behavior, we propose CoT-Recipe, a formal approach to modulate the mix of CoT and non-CoT examples in meta-training sequences. We demonstrate that careful modulation via CoT-Recipe can increase the accuracy of transformers on novel tasks by up to 300% even when there are no CoT examples available in-context. We confirm the broader effectiveness of these techniques by applying them to pretrained LLMs (Qwen2.5 series) for symbolic reasoning tasks and observing gains of up to 130% in accuracy.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.712ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models

Chahat Raj George Mason University, Bowen Wei, Aylin Caliskan University of Washington, Antonios Anastasopoulos Athena Research Center and George Mason University, Ziwei Zhu George Mason University

原文摘要

While bias in large language models (LLMs) is well-studied, similar concerns in vision-language models (VLMs) have received comparatively less attention. Existing VLM bias studies often focus on portrait-style images and gender-occupation associations, overlooking broader and more complex social stereotypes and their implied harm. This work introduces Vignette, a large-scale VQA benchmark with 30M+ images for evaluating bias in VLMs through a question-answering framework spanning four directions: factuality, perception, stereotyping, and decision making. Beyond narrowly-centered studies, we assess how VLMs interpret identities in contextualized settings, revealing how models make trait and capability assumptions and exhibit patterns of discrimination. Drawing from social psychology, we examine how VLMs connect visual identity cues to trait and role-based inferences, encoding social hierarchies, through biased selections. Our findings uncover subtle, multifaceted, and surprising stereotypical patterns, offering insights into how VLMs construct social meaning from inputs.

cs.CL · cs.CV

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.713ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

BiMind: A Dual-Head Reasoning Model with Attention-Geometry Adapter for Incorrect Information Detection

Zhongxing Zhang, Emily K. Vraga University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Jisu Huh, Jaideep Srivastava University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

原文摘要

Incorrect information poses significant challenges by disrupting content veracity and integrity, yet most detection approaches struggle to jointly balance textual content verification with external knowledge modification under collapsed attention geometries. To address this issue, we propose a dual-head reasoning framework, BiMind, which disentangles content-internal reasoning from knowledge-augmented reasoning. In BiMind, we introduce three core innovations: (i) an attention geometry adapter that reshapes attention logits via token-conditioned offsets and mitigates attention collapse; (ii) a self-retrieval knowledge mechanism, which constructs an in-domain semantic memory through kNN retrieval and injects retrieved neighbors via feature-wise linear modulation; (iii) the uncertainty-aware fusion strategies, including entropy-gated fusion and a trainable agreement head, stabilized by a symmetric Kullback-Leibler agreement regularizer. To quantify the knowledge contributions, we define a novel metric, Value-of-eXperience (VoX), to measure instance-wise logit gains from knowledge-augmented reasoning. Experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our BiMind model outperforms advanced detection approaches and provides interpretable diagnostics on when and why knowledge matters. Our BiMind model and the tested datasets are available at https://github.com/cvzh/BiMind.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.714ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Autonomous Knowledge Graph Exploration with Adaptive Breadth-Depth Retrieval

Joaquin Polonuer, Lucas Vittor Harvard University, Iñaki Arango Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Ayush Noori University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, David A. Clifton University of Oxford, Luciano Del Corro Universidad de San Andres and Lumina Labs, Marinka Zitnik Harvard University

原文摘要

Retrieving evidence for language model queries from knowledge graphs requires balancing broad search across the graph with multi-hop traversal to follow relational links. Similarity-based retrievers provide coverage but remain shallow, whereas traversal-based methods rely on selecting seed nodes to start exploration, which can fail when queries span multiple entities and relations. We introduce ARK: Adaptive Retriever of Knowledge, a tool-using KG retriever that gives a language model control over this breadth-depth tradeoff using a two-operation toolset: global lexical search over node descriptors and one-hop neighborhood exploration that composes into multi-hop traversal. ARK alternates between breadth-oriented discovery and depth-oriented expansion without depending on a fragile seed selection, a pre-set hop depth, or requiring retrieval training. ARK adapts tool use to queries, using global search for language-heavy queries and neighborhood exploration for relation-heavy queries.On STaRK, ARK reaches 59.1% average Hit@1 and 67.4 average MRR, improving average Hit@1 by up to 31.4% and average MRR by up to 28.0% over retrieval-based and agent-based training-free methods.Finally, we distill ARK’s tool-use trajectories from a large teacher into an 8B model via label-free imitation, improving Hit@1 by +7.0, +26.6, and +13.5 absolute points over the base 8B model on AMAZON, MAG, and PRIME datasets, respectively, while retaining up to 98.5% of the teacher’s Hit@1 rate.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.715ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Retrieval Heads are Dynamic

Yuping Lin Michigan State University, Zitao Li Zoom, Yue Xing Michigan State University, Pengfei He Michigan State University, Yingqian Cui Michigan State University, Yaliang Li Alibaba Group, Bolin Ding Alibaba Group, Jingren Zhou Alibaba Group 等 9 位作者

原文摘要

Recent studies have identified “retrieval heads” in Large Language Models (LLMs) responsible for extracting information from input contexts. However, prior works largely rely on static statistics aggregated across datasets, identifying heads that perform retrieval on average. This perspective overlooks the fine-grained temporal dynamics of autoregressive generation. In this paper, we investigate retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective. Through extensive analysis, we establish three core claims: (1) Dynamism: Retrieval heads vary dynamically across timesteps; (2) Irreplaceability: Dynamic retrieval heads are specific at each timestep and cannot be effectively replaced by static retrieval heads; and (3) Correlation: The model’s hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. We validate these findings on the Needle-in-a-Haystack task and a multi-hop QA task, and quantify the differences on the utility of dynamic and static retrieval heads in a Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework. Our study provides new insights into the internal mechanisms of LLMs.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.716ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision

Zhaoyang Wang, Yiming Liang Purdue University, Xuchao Zhang Microsoft, Qianhui Wu Microsoft, Siwei Han, Anson Bastos Microsoft, Rujia Wang Microsoft, Chetan Bansal Microsoft 等 12 位作者

原文摘要

Web agents struggle to adapt to new websites due to the scarcity of environment specific tasks and demonstrations. Recent works have explored synthetic data generation to address this challenge, however, they suffer from data quality issues where synthesized tasks contain hallucinations that cannot be executed, and collected trajectories are noisy with redundant or misaligned actions. In this paper, we propose SynthAgent, a fully synthetic supervision framework that aims at improving synthetic data quality via dual refinement of both tasks and trajectories. Our approach begins by synthesizing diverse tasks through categorized exploration of web elements, ensuring efficient coverage of the target environment. During trajectory collection, tasks are refined only when conflicts with observations are detected, which mitigates hallucinations while preserving task consistency. After collection, we conduct trajectory refinement with global context to mitigate potential noise or misalignments. Finally, we fine-tune open-source web agents on the refined synthetic data to adapt them to the target environment. Experimental results demonstrate that SynthAgent outperforms existing synthetic data methods, validating the importance of high-quality synthetic supervision. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SynthAgent.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.717ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

More Than Meets the Eye: Measuring the Semiotic Gap in Vision-Language Models via Semantic Anchorage

Wei He

原文摘要

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at photorealistic generation, yet often struggle to represent abstract meaning such as idiomatic interpretations of noun compounds. To study whether high visual fidelity interferes with idiomatic compositionality under visual abstraction, we introduce DIVA, a controlled benchmark that replaces high-fidelity visual detail with schematic iconicity by generating paired, sense-anchored visualizations for literal and idiomatic readings.We further propose Semantic Alignment Gap (\Delta), an architecture-agnostic metric that quantifies divergence between literal and idiomatic visual grounding.We additionally introduce a directional signed bias b(t) to separately measure the direction and strength of literal preference.Evaluating 8 recent VLMs, we reveal a consistent Literal Superiority Bias: model scale alone does not resolve literal preference, and increased visual fidelity is associated with weaker symbolic alignment, suggesting cognitive interference from hyper-realistic imagery. Our findings suggest that improving compositional understanding requires iconographic abstraction of visual input and anchoring interpretation and generation in intended meaning.

cs.CL · cs.CV

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.718ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

LLM Agents in Law: Taxonomy, Applications, and Challenges

Shuang Liu Carnegie Mellon University, Ruijia Zhang, Ruoyun Ma ByteDance Inc., Yujia Deng Facebook, Lanyi Zhu University of Washington, Jiayu Li University of Chicago, Zelong Li Amazon, Zhibin Shen Columbia University 等 9 位作者

原文摘要

Large language models (LLMs) have precipitated a dramatic improvement in the legal domain, yet the deployment of standalone models faces significant limitations regarding hallucination, outdated information, and verifiability. Recently, LLM agents have attracted significant attention as a solution to these challenges, utilizing advanced capabilities such as planning, memory, and tool usage to meet the rigorous standards of legal practice. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of LLM agents for legal tasks, analyzing how these architectures bridge the gap between technical capabilities and domain-specific needs. Our major contributions include: (1) systematically analyzing the technical transition from standard legal LLMs to legal agents; (2) presenting a structured taxonomy of current agent applications across distinct legal practice areas; (3) discussing evaluation methodologies specifically for agentic performance in law; and (4) identifying open challenges and outlining future directions for developing robust and autonomous legal assistants.

cs.CL · cs.AI

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.719ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

BenchMarker: An Education-Inspired Toolkit for Highlighting Flaws in Multiple-Choice Benchmarks

Nishant Balepur, Bhavya Rajasekaran, Hyunjin Jane Oh, Michael Xie, Atrey Desai University of Maryland, College Park and University of Texas at Arlington, Vipul Gupta Scale AI, Steven James Moore George Mason University, Eunsol Choi New York University 等 10 位作者

原文摘要

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is standard in NLP, but benchmarks lack rigorous quality control. We present BenchMarker, an education-inspired toolkit using LLM judges to flag three common MCQ flaws: 1) contamination—items appearing exactly online; 2) shortcuts—cues in the choices that enable guessing; and 3) writing errors—structural/grammatical issues based on a 19-rule education rubric. We validate BenchMarker with human annotations, then run the tool to audit 12 benchmarks, revealing: 2) contaminated MCQs tend to inflate accuracy, while writing errors tend to lower it and change rankings beyond random; and 3) prior benchmark repairs address their targeted issues (i.e., lowering accuracy with LLM-written distractors), but inadvertently add new flaws (i.e. implausible distractors, many correct answers). Overall, flaws in MCQs degrade NLP evaluation, but education research offers a path forward. We release BenchMarker to bridge the fields and improve MCQA benchmark design.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.72ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Leave My Images Alone: Preventing Multi-Modal Large Language Models from Analyzing Images via Visual Prompt Injection

Zedian Shao, Hongbin Liu Google, Yuepeng Hu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong

原文摘要

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing Internet-scale image data, offering significant benefits but also raising critical safety and societal concerns. In particular, these models may be misused to extract sensitive information from personal images, such as identifying individuals or revealing locations. In this work, we propose ImageProtector, a method designed to protect images from unauthorized analysis by MLLMs. Before an image is shared online, ImageProtector embeds a carefully crafted, nearly imperceptible perturbation that acts as a visual prompt injection attack on MLLMs. Consequently, when a malicious actor downloads and queries a protected image, the MLLM is consistently misled into generating a refusal response such as “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that request.” We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of ImageProtector across six MLLMs and four datasets. Additionally, we evaluate three potential countermeasures, Gaussian noise, DiffPure, and adversarial training, and show that while they partially mitigate the impact of ImageProtector, they simultaneously degrade model accuracy and/or efficiency.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.720ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Model Internal Sleuthing: Finding Lexical Identity and Inflectional Features in Modern Language Models

Michael Li Carnegie Mellon University, Nishant Subramani Carnegie Mellon University

原文摘要

Large transformer-based language models dominate modern NLP, yet our understanding of how they encode linguistic information relies primarily on studies of early models like BERT and GPT-2. We systematically probe 25 models from BERT Base to Qwen2.5-7B focusing on two linguistic properties: lexical identity and inflectional features across 6 diverse languages. We find a consistent pattern: inflectional features are linearly decodable throughout the model, while lexical identity is prominent early but increasingly weakens with depth. Further analysis of the representation geometry reveals that models with aggressive mid-layer dimensionality compression show reduced steering effectiveness in those layers, despite probe accuracy remaining high. Pretraining analysis shows that inflectional structure stabilizes early while lexical identity representations continue evolving. Taken together, our findings suggest that transformers maintain inflectional features across layers, while trading off lexical identity for compact, predictive representations.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.721ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

HAT: Hallucination Annotation for Translation

Rajen Chatterjee Apple, Xintong Li Apple, Paisarn Charoenpornsawat, Allen Lee Apple

原文摘要

Hallucinations in machine translation (MT)—outputs that may be fluent yet unfaithful to the source content—remain a critical obstacle. They hinder the reliable deployment of MT systems in real-world applications. Despite growing attention to this phenomenon, progress has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks dedicated to hallucination detection. We introduce HAT (Hallucination Annotation for Translation), a novel dataset designed to advance research on this problem. HAT comprises 350,959 span-level annotated samples across 38 language pairs, with approximately 8,000–10,000 samples per pair partitioned into training, development, and test sets. Annotations were produced by professional translators under rigorous quality control protocols to ensure reliability. We provide a detailed analysis of hallucination distributions and establish benchmark performance using a diverse set of baselines, including automatic MT evaluation metrics as well as large language models. By providing the first large-scale, systematically annotated resource for hallucination detection in MT, HAT enables the development of more faithful translation models and lays the groundwork for future research on building trustworthy machine translation systems.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.722ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

DMRetriever: A Family of Models for Improved Text Retrieval in Disaster Management

Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong Texas A&M University - College Station, Chengkai Liu Texas A&M University - College Station, Allen Lin Meta, Lingfeng Shi, Ali Mostafavi Texas A&M, James Caverlee Texas A&M University - College Station and Google

原文摘要

Effective and efficient access to relevant information is essential for disaster management. However, no retrieval model is specialized for disaster management, and existing general-domain models fail to handle the varied search intents inherent to disaster management scenarios, resulting in inconsistent and unreliable performance. To this end, we introduce DMRetriever, the first series of dense retrieval models (33M to 7.6B) tailored for this domain. It is trained through a novel three-stage framework of bidirectional attention adaptation, unsupervised contrastive pre-training, and difficulty-aware progressive instruction fine-tuning, using high-quality data generated through an advanced data refinement pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DMRetriever achieves state-of-the-art performance across all six search intents at every model scale. Moreover, DMRetriever is highly parameter-efficient, with 596M model outperforming baselines over 13.3 larger and 33M model exceeding baselines with only 7.6% of their parameters. All codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/KaiYin97/DMRETRIEVER.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.723ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Language Models Don’t Know What You Want: Evaluating Personalization in Deep Research Needs Real Users

Nishant Balepur, Malachi Hamada Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Varsha Kishore Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Sergey Feldman Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Cowboys, Amanpreet Singh Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Pao Siangliulue Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Joseph Chee Chang Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Eunsol Choi New York University 等 10 位作者

原文摘要

Deep Research (DR) tools (e.g. OpenAI DR) help researchers cope with ballooning publishing counts. Such tools can synthesize scientific papers to answer researchers’ queries, but lack understanding of their users. We change that in MyScholarQA (MySQA), a personalized DR tool that: 1) infers a profile of a user’s research interests; 2) proposes personalized actions for a user’s input query; and 3) writes a multi-section report for the query that follows user-approved actions. We first test MySQA with NLP’s standard protocol: we design a benchmark of synthetic users and LLM judges, where MySQA beats baselines in citation metrics and personalized action-following. However, we suspect this process does not cover all aspects of personalized DR users value, so we interview users in an online version of MySQA to unmask them. We reveal nine nuanced errors of personalized DR undetectable by our LLM judges, and we study qualitative feedback to form lessons for future DR design. In all, we argue for a pillar of personalization that easy-to-use LLM judges can lead NLP to overlook: real progress in personalization is only possible with real users.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.724ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

LAD-RAG: Layout-aware Dynamic RAG for Visually-Rich Document Understanding

Zhivar Sourati, Zheng Wang Oracle, Marianne Menglin Liu Oracle, Yazhe Hu, Mengqing Guo, Sujeeth Bharadwaj Oracle, Kyu J. Han, Tao Sheng Oracle 等 11 位作者

原文摘要

Question answering over visually rich documents (VRDs) requires reasoning not only over isolated content but also over documents’ structural organization and cross-page dependencies. However, conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encode content in isolated chunks during ingestion, losing structural and cross-page dependencies, and retrieve a fixed number of pages at inference, regardless of the specific demands of the question or context. This often results in incomplete evidence retrieval and degraded answer quality for multi-page reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose LAD-RAG, a novel Layout-Aware Dynamic RAG framework. During ingestion, LAD-RAG constructs a symbolic document graph that captures layout structure and cross-page dependencies, adding it alongside standard neural embeddings to yield a more holistic representation of the document. During inference, an LLM agent dynamically interacts with the neural and symbolic indices to adaptively retrieve the necessary evidence based on the query. Experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, DUDE, and MP-DocVQA demonstrate that LAD-RAG improves retrieval, achieving over 90% perfect recall on average without any top-k tuning, and outperforming baseline retrievers by up to 20% in recall at comparable noise levels, yielding higher QA accuracy with minimal latency.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.725ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Among Us: Measuring and Mitigating Malicious Contributions in Model Collaboration Systems

Ziyuan Yang, Wenxuan Ding New York University, Shangbin Feng University of Washington, Yulia Tsvetkov Department of Computer Science, University of Washington

原文摘要

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in collaboration: multiple LMs trained by different parties collaborate through routing systems, multi-agent debate, model merging, and more. Critical safety risks remain in this decentralized paradigm: what if some of the models in multi-LLM systems are compromised or malicious? We first quantify the impact of malicious models by engineering four categories of malicious LMs, plug them into four types of popular model collaboration systems, and evaluate the compromised system across 10 datasets. We find that malicious models have a severe impact on the multi-LLM systems, especially for reasoning and safety domains where performance is lowered by 7.12% and 7.94% on average. We then propose mitigation strategies to alleviate the impact of malicious components, by employing external supervisors that oversee model collaboration to disable/mask them out to reduce their influence. On average, these strategies recover 95.31% of the initial performance, while making model collaboration systems fully resistant to malicious models remains an open research question.

cs.CL · cs.MA

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表

首次观测 · 记录 #1ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.726ACL Anthology · ACL 2026

Not All Tokens Matter: Towards Efficient LLM Reasoning via Token Significance in Reinforcement Learning

Hanbing Liu, Lang Cao University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yuanyi Ren, Mengyu Zhou Alibaba Group, Haoyu Dong, Xiaojun Ma Microsoft, Shi Han Microsoft, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft

原文摘要

Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities but often produce unnecessarily long explanations that reduce efficiency. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to improve reasoning, most methods focus on accuracy and rely on uniform length-based rewards that overlook the differing contributions of individual tokens, often harming correctness. We revisit length optimization in RL through the perspective of token significance. Observing that many chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contribute little to the final answer, we introduce a significance-aware length reward that selectively penalizes insignificance tokens, reducing redundancy while preserving essential reasoning. We also propose a dynamic length reward that encourages more detailed reasoning early in training and gradually shifts toward conciseness as learning progresses. Integrating these components into standard policy optimization yields a framework that improves both reasoning efficiency and accuracy. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate substantial reductions in response length while preserving or improving correctness, highlighting the importance of modeling token significance for efficient LLM reasoning.

cs.CL

Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表