Deep research agents conduct multi-step Web searches and synthesise retrieved information into analytical reports. Evaluating these outputs requires checking which analyses they deliver, beyond the presence of relevant facts. Query-specific binary rubrics make individual requirements explicit, but task-level checklists may leave the overall analytical structure underexamined. We introduce RubricAtlas, which derives type-level analytical requirements from expert reports on different objects within the same research type and organises detailed checks around recurring analytical questions. The requirements give related tasks a shared standard for what to analyse, without prescribing their answers. Our framework links binary checkpoints to report passages and evaluates completeness separately from argument validity. Built from 3,079 Chinese financial research reports, RubricAtlas covers 99 research types. Reference-report selection experiments show that individual reports cover only about half of their type's analytical questions, and that selecting requirements from different reports changes evaluation scores and agent rankings. Across ten agents, two judge pipelines achieve checkpoint agreement of $κ$ = 0.71 and agent-ranking agreement of Kendall $τ$ = 0.87. Controlled deletions reduce scores on the affected analyses, while padding produces no detectable increase. These findings support type-level rubrics for comparing the analytical completeness of Web deep research outputs, with individual decisions traceable to report evidence.
Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models, their substantial computational costs, latency, and privacy risks hinder their widespread deployment in real-world applications. Small Language Models (SLMs) with fewer than 10 billion parameters present a promising alternative; however, their inherent limitations in knowledge and reasoning curtail their effectiveness. Existing research primarily focuses on enhancing SLMs through scaling laws or fine-tuning strategies while overlooking the potential of using agent paradigms, such as tool use and multi-agent collaboration, to systematically compensate for the inherent weaknesses of small models. To address this gap, this paper presents the first large-scale, comprehensive study of <10B open-source models under three paradigms: (1) the base model, (2) a single agent equipped with tools, and (3) a routing-based multi-agent system with collaborative capabilities.Our results show that structured agent frameworks (combining step-by-step reasoning and tool use) substantially improve effectiveness over direct prompting, with single-agent systems achieving the best balance between performance and cost. In contrast, routing-based multi-agent setups introduce additional coordination overhead with limited gains under small-model constraints.Our findings highlight the importance of agent-centric design for efficient and trustworthy deployment in resource-constrained settings.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Weijie Jiang, Gaolei He East China Normal University, Beibei Xiong East China Normal University, Jianlin Wang, Zhengfeng Yang East China Normal University
Autoformalization aims to bridge the gap between human mathematical intuition and formal proof by automating the translation of informal reasoning into machine-verifiable languages. Despite significant breakthroughs catalyzed by Large Language Models (LLMs), autoformalizing Combinatorics remains a formidable challenge due to its intricate structural dependencies and the severe scarcity of high-quality formal datasets. To address these challenges, we propose SAIR-Comb, a Structure-Aware Iterative Refinement framework for Combinatorics powered by Lean 4 and LLMs. SAIR-Comb employs a multi-stage pipeline: first, it performs data augmentation and refinement by rectifying syntactic, semantic, and structural errors, guided by a curated manual combinatorics dataset. The model then undergoes a two-stage training regime: expert iteration with syntactic grounding, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to align formal reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, we introduce Structural Consistency—a rigorous new metric designed to expose formalizing failures that elude traditional semantic-only evaluations. Experiments demonstrate that SAIR-Comb achieves strong performance on the specialized CombiBench while remaining highly competitive on general-domain benchmarks, including PutnamBench and ProverBench.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yanli Wang, Yanlin Wang Sun Yat-Sen University, Bowen Zhang, Yiwei Zhang, Daya Guo, Jiachi Chen, Hongyu Zhang Chongqing University, Zibin Zheng Sun Yat-sen University
Code Large Language Models face critical Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) latency challenges when handling long code completion due to the quadratic complexity (O(n^2)) of attention mechanisms. While existing sparse attention methods attempt to address this issue, they suffer from three key limitations: (1) general sparse patterns cause excessive accuracy degradation without considering code structure, (2) code-specific methods achieve only logical sparsity without actual computational speedup, and (3) limited adaptation to complex scenarios such as repository-level completion. We propose SabreCoder, a training-free Structure-aware block-sparse attention mechanism that bridges the gap between logical and computational sparsity. SabreCoder parses code into semantic chunks, constructs chunk-level sparse patterns through dependency analysis and similarity matching, and maps them to GPU-friendly block-sparse formats. Extensive experiments on LCC and CrossCodeEval benchmarks demonstrate that SabreCoder reduces TTFT by 45-55% while maintaining accuracy within 3% of dense attention.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zili Wei, Yilin Wang, Xiaocui Yang Northeastern University, Shi Feng Northeastern University, China, Weidong Bao Northeastern University, Daling Wang, Zihan Wang Northeastern University, Yifei Zhang
Triple-based Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (iRAG) mitigates document-level noise for multi-hop question answering. However, existing methods still face limitations: (i) greedy single-path expansion, which propagates early errors and fails to capture parallel evidence from different reasoning branches, and (ii) granularity–demand mismatch, where a single evidence representation struggles to balance noise control with contextual sufficiency. In this paper, we propose the Construction–Integration Retrieval and Adaptive Generation model, CIRAG. It introduces an Iterative Construction–Integration module that constructs candidate triples and history-conditionally integrates them to distill core triples and generate the next-hop query. This module mitigates the greedy trap by preserving multiple plausible evidence chains. Besides, to address the granularity–demand mismatch, we propose an Adaptive Cascaded Multi-Granularity Generation module that progressively expands contextual evidence based on the problem requirements, from triples to supporting sentences and full passages. Moreover, we introduce Trajectory Distillation, which distills the teacher model’s integration policy into a lightweight student, enabling efficient and reliable long-horizon reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIRAG achieves superior performance compared to existing iRAG methods.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Chenglin Wang East China Normal University, Yucheng Zhou University of Macau, Shuang Chen, Tao Wang Imaging Algorithm Center, vivo Mobile Communication Co., Ltd., Kai Zhang East China Normal University
Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the “generation frontier”, regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 \times speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.
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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
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a surge in both model supply and application demands. To facilitate effective matching between them, generic and efficient benchmark generators that can construct high-quality benchmarks are widely needed. However, human annotators are constrained by inefficiency, and current LLM-based benchmark generators lack not only generalizability but also a comprehensive evaluation framework for validation and optimization. To fill this gap, we first establish an automated evaluation framework, structured around four dimensions and ten criteria. Under this framework, we carefully analyze the advantages and weaknesses of directly prompting LLMs as generic benchmark generators. On this basis, we introduce a series of methods to address the identified weaknesses and integrate them as BenchMaker. Experiments across multiple LLMs and tasks confirm that BenchMaker achieves comparable performance to human-annotated benchmarks on most metrics, highlighting its generalizability and validity. More importantly, it delivers highly consistent evaluation results across 21 LLMs (e.g., 0.969 Pearson correlation against MMLU-Pro on language understanding task), while incurring minimal overhead (e.g., 0.005 and 0.38 minutes per sample when using GPT-4o mini as generator).
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Huizi Cui Tianjin University, Huan Ma Tianjin University, Qilin Wang, Yuhang Gao, Changqing Zhang Tianjin University
Large language models (LLMs) have progressed rapidly in complex reasoning and question answering, yet LLM hallucination remains a central bottleneck that hinders practical deployment, especially for commercial black-box LLMs accessible only via APIs. Existing uncertainty quantification methods typically depend on computationally expensive multiple sampling or internal parameters, which prevents real-time estimation and fails to capture information implicit in the black-box reasoning process. To address this issue, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Distillation (DisAAD), which introduces a generation-discrimination architecture to guide a lightweight proxy model to learn the high-quality regions of the output distribution of the black-box LLM, thus effectively endowing it with the ability to “know whether the black-box LLM knows or not”. Subsequently, we use the proxy model to reproduce the specific responses of the black-box LLM and estimate the corresponding uncertainty based on evidence learning. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness and promise of our proposed method, indicating that a proxy model even one that only accounts for 1% of the target LLM’s size can achieve reliable uncertainty quantification.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuchun Fan, Bei Li Meituan, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu Northeastern University, Jian Yang, Xin Chen Meituan, Rongxiang Weng 等 12 位作者
Reinforcement learning has proven effective for enhancing multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its benefits have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. Existing methods struggle with a fundamental trade-off: prioritizing input-language consistency severely hampers reasoning quality, while prioritizing reasoning often leads to unintended language drift toward English. We address this challenge with LANG, a novel framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. Our method incorporates two key mechanisms to prevent dependency on these hints: a progressive decay schedule that gradually withdraws scaffolding, and a language-adaptive switch that tailors learning horizons to specific language difficulties. Empirical results on challenging multilingual mathematical benchmarks reveal that LANG substantially enhances reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. Moreover, we show that our framework generalizes beyond mathematics, fostering more consistent language alignment across model layers.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiaopeng Li, Yuanjin Zheng, Wanyu Wang, Wenlin Zhang City University of Hong Kong, Pengyue Jia City University of Hong Kong, Yingyi Zhang, Haiying He, Mengyang Ma 等 12 位作者
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align model outputs with individual user preferences, a crucial capability for user-centric applications. However, the prevalent approach of fine-tuning a separate module for each user faces two major limitations: (1) storage costs scale linearly with the number of users, rendering the method unscalable; and (2) fine-tuning a static model from scratch often yields suboptimal performance for users with sparse data. To address these challenges, we propose MTA, a Merge-then-Adapt framework for PLLMs. MTA comprises three key stages. First, we construct a shared Meta-LoRA Bank by selecting anchor users and pre-training meta-personalization traits within meta-LoRA modules. Second, to ensure scalability and enable dynamic personalization combination beyond static models, we introduce an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage. This stage retrieves and dynamically merges the most relevant anchor meta-LoRAs to synthesize a user-specific one, thereby eliminating the need for user-specific storage and supporting more flexible personalization. Third, we propose a LoRA Stacking for Few-Shot Personalization stage, which applies an additional ultra-low-rank, lightweight LoRA module on top of the merged LoRA. Fine-tuning this module enables effective personalization under few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods across multiple tasks. Our code is also available.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zengbin Wang Alibaba Group, Feng Xiong Harbin Institute of Technology, Liang Lin, Xuecai Hu AMAP, Alibaba Group, Yong Wang, Yanlin Wang Sun Yat-Sen University, Man Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xiangxiang Chu Alibaba Group
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, the inherent text-dominated nature of VLMs often leads to insufficient visual faithfulness, characterized by sparse attention activation to visual tokens. More importantly, our empirical analysis reveals that temporal visual forgetting along reasoning steps exacerbates this deficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose Visually-Guided Policy Optimization (VGPO), a novel framework to reinforce visual focus during policy optimization. Specifically, VGPO initially introduces a Visual Attention Compensation mechanism that leverages visual similarity to localize and amplify visual cues, while progressively elevating visual expectations in later steps to counteract visual forgetting. Building on this mechanism, we implement a dual-grained advantage re-weighting strategy: the intra-trajectory level highlights tokens exhibiting relatively high visual activation, while the inter-trajectory level prioritizes trajectories demonstrating superior visual accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VGPO achieves better visual activation and superior performance in mathematical multimodal reasoning and visual-dependent tasks. The code has been released at https://github.com/wzb-bupt/VGPO.
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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
Multi-agent LLM systems routinely generate multiple candidate responses that are aggregated by an LLM judge. To reduce the dominant prefill cost in such pipelines, recent work advocates KV cache reuse across partially shared contexts and reports substantial speedups for generation agents. In this work, we show that these efficiency gains do not transfer uniformly to judge-centric inference. Across GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval, we find that reuse strategies that are effective for execution agents can severely perturb judge behavior: end-task accuracy may appear stable, yet the judge’s selection becomes highly inconsistent with dense prefill. We quantify this risk using Judge Consistency Rate (JCR) and provide diagnostics showing that reuse systematically weakens cross-candidate attention, especially for later candidate blocks. Our ablation further demonstrates that explicit cross-candidate interaction is crucial for preserving dense-prefill decisions. Overall, our results identify a previously overlooked failure mode of KV cache reuse and highlight judge-centric inference as a distinct regime that demands dedicated, risk-aware system design.
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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
Yidan Liang, Jia Zhu Zhejiang Normal University, Weijie Shi Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hanghui Guo, Yue Cui Alibaba Group, Jiawei Shen Zhejiang Normal University, Guoqing Ma, Jingjiang Liu 等 12 位作者
High-quality data is the cornerstone of advancing large language models. However, the field currently faces a critical dilemma: the supply of premium data is nearing depletion, while vast stale corpora remain underutilized. Our empirical analysis reveals that training models on such data directly often leads to performance degradation. We attribute this phenomenon to the data affinity gap, a misalignment stemming from the model’s inability to effectively comprehend the data or inherent quality defects. To bridge this gap, we propose Restoring Stale Data Affinity (RSDA) framework. First, utilizing our proposed potential entropy metric, RSDA quantifies the latent value of samples to effectively identify stale data with higher renovation potential. Subsequently, the framework employs a dynamic renovation strategy selection mechanism to determine the optimal component-level strategy for each instance, transforming low-affinity stale samples into high-quality training data. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that RSDA effectively enhances data affinity, achieving performance improvements using less than 10% of the data volume, thereby underscoring that the latent potential of stale corpora remains largely untapped. The code is available at https://github.com/wenfiii/RSDA.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sheng Zhang, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia City University of Hong Kong, Yichao Wang, Xiaowei Qian City University of Hong Kong, Wenlin Zhang City University of Hong Kong, Maolin Wang 等 10 位作者
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have scaled the potential for reasoning and agentic search, wherein models autonomously plan, retrieve, and reason over external knowledge to answer complex queries. However, the iterative think–search loop accumulates long system memories, leading to memory dilution problem. In addition, existing memory management methods struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents and often lose substantial information. Therefore, we propose MemSearch-o1, an agentic search framework built on reasoning-aligned memory growth and retracing. MemSearch-o1 dynamically grows fine-grained memory fragments from memory seed tokens from the queries, then retraces and deeply refines the memory via a contribution function, and finally reorganizes a globally connected memory path. This shifts memory management from stream-like concatenation to structured, token-level growth with path-based reasoning. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 substantially mitigates memory dilution, and more effectively activates the reasoning potential of diverse LLMs, establishing a solid foundation for memory-aware agentic intelligence.
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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
Jingjiang Liu, Jia Zhu Zhejiang Normal University, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yue Cui Alibaba Group, Xiaokang Jin Zhejiang Normal University, Yilin Wang Zhejiang Normal University, Qingyu Niu 等 13 位作者
Existing video summarization methods mainly compress content for gist browsing, but they often break the prerequisite logic in instructional videos and induce logical inversions (e.g., conclusions before premises). We formalize this problem as Structure-Pedagogical Reconstruction (SPR). SPR raises two challenges: (1) Structure Hallucination, where retrieved knowledge is topologically valid but not evidence-grounded by the blackboard; and (2) Logical Inversion, where soft prompt-level graph injection fails to enforce prerequisite order during decoding. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction (KCVR), a Plan-then-Generate neuro-symbolic framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. KCVR prunes a Dual-Layer Epistemic Graph into a minimal video-supported plan, then realizes the plan with visually anchored attention and topology-constrained decoding. We additionally release EduStruct, a 10-discipline benchmark for SPR and structure-centric evaluation. Experiments show that KCVR outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/mark1001-ljj/video_sum.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yanbing Chen, Ruilin Wang, Zihao Yang Northeastern University, Lavender Yao Jiang, Eric Karl Oermann New York University
Packing and shuffling tokens is a common practice in training auto-regressive language models to prevent overfitting and improve efficiency. Documents are typically concatenated to chunks of maximum sequence length (MSL) and shuffled in chunks of tokens (atom-size chunk), possibly breaking context within documents. An alternative approach is padding, which only includes one document per chunk. To optimize both packing strategies (concatenation vs padding), we explored the optimal atom size for shuffling and compared performance and efficiency. We found that in the most common setup (where average document length is greater than MSL), matching atom size to MSL yields the lowest perplexity, controlling for dataset. Also, padding yields lower final perplexity than concatenation at the cost of lower efficiency. This trade-off informs the choice of shuffling and packing methods in training LMs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) · 2026 · 正式发表