Hankun Wang, Bohan Li, Shi Lian, Xiaoyu Gu, Jing Peng, Da Zheng, Yiwei Guo, Colin Zhang 等 10 位作者
Speech editing for content creation requires precise control over both what an edit should do and where it should apply. Free-form natural language provides a flexible interface for expressing edit requests, but its ambiguity may leave the intended operation, parameters, or target region underspecified. We study a semi-formal transcript-grounded edit instruction that specifies operation categories and parameters and binds them to transcript spans or boundaries. This semantic timeline avoids explicit timestamp alignment and provides an externally inspectable contract for compositional edits. We instantiate the interface in dots$.$tts$.$edit, a speech editing model built on a continuous autoregressive speech generation architecture. Four representative speech-creation controls cover lexical content, affective expression, pitch and speaking-rate delivery, and temporal phrasing through text, emotion, prosody, and pause editing. Task-specific data pipelines construct operation- and scope-controlled pairs while retaining source-derived context outside each target region. We further introduce doteBench, a bilingual benchmark that measures precise instruction following, local preservation, and audio quality across the four controls and their composition. Experiments show leading overall instruction following and local preservation across its five editing categories, while audio quality remains comparable to existing open-source systems. Across three Seed-TTS-Eval shards, the model shows negligible differences from the base model in zero-shot TTS recognition error rate and speaker similarity.
Jialin Zhang, Lakshya A Agrawal, Shangyin Tan, Donghyun Lee, Lutfi Eren Erdogan, Dan Klein, Koushik Sen, Alex Dimakis 等 9 位作者
Reflective text optimization makes agentic systems better, but the optimization loop is itself a resource-hungry workload whose sequential structure leaves parallel evaluation capacity idle. We extend the open-source GEPA optimizer to propose and evaluate a batch of candidates on each optimization step instead of one candidate at a time. In our sweep on two tasks, most batched runs finished in half the wall-clock time or less, and the fastest in about a quarter to a third. Batched settings also achieved higher held-out test scores, from 68.9% to 72.1% on LiveBench-Math (with $2\times2$) and from 49.0% to 60.0% on HoVer (with $8\times1$). A simple runtime model explains the measured speedups under a finite worker pool, and batched settings also spend their metric-call and dollar budgets more efficiently. We frame the axes along which a reflective optimization step can scale in parallel, a first look at allocating a fixed optimization budget across them.
Industrial Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems depend on optical character recognition (OCR) to transform visual documents into text. Existing OCR benchmarks rely on character-level metrics, which inadequately measure downstream RAG effectiveness under real-world conditions. We introduce an OCR benchmark for industrial RAG systems covering 11 challenging document types, including extreme layouts, high-resolution pages, complex or watermarked backgrounds, historical documents with non-standard reading orders, visually decorated text, and documents containing tables and mathematical formulas. Evaluating recent SOTA OCR models under a controlled OCR-first RAG pipeline shows clear performance degradation on realistic industrial documents despite strong conventional benchmark scores. We find that high OCR accuracy does not necessarily translate into strong downstream RAG performance: structural and semantic errors can cause substantial retrieval failures even when WER/CER remains low. Further analysis shows that this mismatch is category-dependent, arises through both retrieval-side and downstream generation-side failures, and remains stable across representative OCR-first pipeline choices. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/Qihoo360/InduOCRBench.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun
Robust explanations are increasingly required for user trust in enterprise NLP, yet pre-deployment validation is difficult in the common case of black-box deployment (API-only access) where representation-based explainers are infeasible and existing studies provide limited guidance on whether explanations remain stable under real user noise, especially when organizations migrate from encoder classifiers to decoder LLMs. To close this gap, we propose a unified black-box robustness evaluation framework for token-level explanations based on leave-one-out occlusion, and operationalize explanation robustness with top-token flip rate under realistic perturbations (swap, deletion, shuffling, and back-translation) at multiple severity levels. Using this protocol, we conduct a systematic cross-architecture comparison across three benchmark datasets and six models spanning encoder and decoder families (BERT, RoBERTa, Qwen 7B/14B, Llama 8B/70B; 64,800 cases). We find that decoder LLMs produce substantially more stable explanations than encoder baselines (73% lower flip rates on average), and that stability improves with model scale (44% gain from 7B to 70B). Finally, we relate robustness improvements to inference cost, yielding a practical cost–robustness tradeoff curve that supports model and explanation selection prior to deployment in compliance-sensitive applications.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xin Huang, Yan Hu, Yue-Jiao Gong, Xinglin Zhang South China University of Technology
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent solution to mitigate the communication and computation costs in federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, we observe that even within low-rank adapters, a substantial portion of parameters manifest negligible updates during federated training, leading to redundant communication and wasted local computation. To address this, we propose GMFL, a plug-and-play layer freezing mechanism designed to seamlessly integrate with existing federated fine-tuning frameworks. Specifically, the server monitors the global update magnitude of each LoRA layer to dynamically generate freezing masks. These masks are updated periodically with a fixed freezing rate, ensuring stable convergence by robustly identifying “saturated” layers. Theoretical analysis confirms the convergence of GMFL, where the freezing mechanism yields a bounded error that scales with client heterogeneity. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks (GLUE, Commonsense Reasoning, Math Reasoning and General Generation) demonstrate that GMFL reduces communication overhead and lowers computational costs while preserving the performance of the underlying federated fine-tuning methods. Our work provides a practical, versatile solution for deploying large-scale federated LLM fine-tuning in resource-constrained environments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tunx-cyber/GMFL.
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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
Shiyao Cui, QingLin Zhang, Di Wang, Yida Lu Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Zhexin Zhang, Jinhua Gao Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jinglin Yang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Min He CNCERT/CC 等 10 位作者
Neologisms, emerging terms in meaning or form, can serve as new vehicles for toxic expression, like “田园女” (“country girl”) as a stigmatizing label targeting feminism. Such toxic neologisms appear benign but have evolved into toxic usage in public consensus, posing challenges to moderation systems and remaining underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how to detect implicit toxicity expressed via neologisms. We first propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms, followed by the construction of a lexicon spanning widely observed risk categories. To capture toxicity grounded in public consensus, we introduce SeTox, a search-augmented framework that enables static large language models (LLMs) to incorporate real-time web context for neologism toxicity detection. Experiments show that SeTox, even with 3B-scale models, outperforms recent large-scale models, demonstrating its scalability to incorporate real-world knowledge for toxic neologism detection. Disclaimer: this paper has offensive contents that may be disturbing to some readers.
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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
Weicai Long, Yusen Hou The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Junning Feng, Houcheng su Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shuo Yang, Donglin Xie, Yanlin Zhang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as conversational assistants in genomics, where they are mainly used to reason over biological knowledge, annotations, and analysis outputs through natural language interfaces. However, existing benchmarks either focus on specialized DNA models trained for sequence prediction or evaluate biological knowledge using text-only questions, leaving the behavior of general-purpose LLMs when directly exposed to raw genome sequences underexplored. We introduce GenomeQA, a benchmark designed to provide a controlled evaluation setting for general-purpose LLMs on sequence-based genome inference tasks. GenomeQA comprises 5,200 samples drawn from multiple biological databases, with sequence lengths ranging from 6 to 1,000 base pairs (bp), spanning six task families: Enhancer and Promoter Identification, Splice Site Identification, Taxonomic Classification, Histone Mark Prediction, Transcription Factor Binding Site Prediction, and TF Motif Prediction. Across six frontier LLMs, we find that models often outperform random baselines, particularly on tasks driven by local sequence cues such as GC content and short motifs, while performance degrades on tasks that require more indirect or multi-step inference over sequence patterns. GenomeQA establishes a diagnostic benchmark for studying and improving the use of general-purpose LLMs on raw genomic sequences.
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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
Zhejun Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Wenqing Zhou Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Haozhe Xu, Lin Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Lei Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Brain-tuning enhances brain alignment and downstream performance by fine-tuning speech language models with neural recordings. However, previous work relies primarily on fMRI, whose temporal resolution integrates neural activity over seconds, blending distinct processing stages into a single supervision signal and precluding temporally targeted training. We introduce ECoG-tuning, which leverages electrocorticography’s millisecond precision to train speech language models. We design temporally targeted windows—a speech window capturing acoustic-phonetic encoding and a language window capturing higher-order linguistic processing—grounded in neuroscientific findings about temporal encoding hierarchies. Evaluating three models on the Podcast ECoG dataset, we find that ECoG-tuning significantly improves brain alignment over pretrained and distillation baselines. Notably, full spatiotemporal dynamics yield 7–17% higher alignment than time-averaged supervision across models, and language-window tuning produces larger gains in higher-order language regions, indicating that temporal precision provides additional training value. Moreover, ECoG-tuned models consistently improve or maintain downstream performance. Overall, our work provides initial evidence that electrophysiology is a viable brain-tuning modality, demonstrating how neuroscientific insights into processing hierarchies can inform principled model training strategies. Code is available at https://github.com/Mochizuki-BUPT/ECoG-Tuning-main.
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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
Derong Xu City University of Hong Kong and University of Science and Technology of China, Shuochen Liu University of Science and Technology of China, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia City University of Hong Kong, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng City University of Hong Kong and Xi'an Jiaotong University, Wenlin Zhang City University of Hong Kong 等 11 位作者
Large language model (LLM) agents require long-term user memory for consistent personalization, but limited context windows hinder tracking evolving preferences over long interactions. Existing memory systems mainly rely on static, hand-crafted update rules; although reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents learn memory updates, sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. Drawing on memory schema theory and the functional division between prefrontal regions and hippocampus regions, we introduce MemCoE, a cognition-inspired two-stage optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. In the first stage, we propose Memory Guideline Induction to optimize a global guideline via contrastive feedback interpreted as textual gradients; in the second stage, Guideline-Aligned Memory Policy Optimization uses the induced guideline to define structured process rewards and performs multi-turn RL to learn a guideline-following memory evolution policy. We evaluate on three personalization memory benchmarks, covering explicit and implicit preferences as well as different sizes and noise levels, and observe consistent improvements over strong baselines with favorable robustness, transferability, and efficiency[https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ACL2026_MemCoE].
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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
Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Tencent, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai Tencent, Xi Chen 等 13 位作者
Model Editing, also known as knowledge editing, is receiving increasing attention in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing model editing approaches predominantly focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. This paper exploratively applies six representative model editing methods (FT, IKE, MEND, SERAC, MEMIT and AlphaEdit) to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) and introduces the first benchmark specifically designed for Vid-LLMs editing—VMEB (Vid-LLMs Model Editing Benchmark)—systematically extending model editing research from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. We position this work as a forward-looking benchmark and a foundational diagnostic study: in the video paradigm, our evaluation dimensions encompass traditional metrics including Reliability, Locality, and Generality, while also introducing a video-specific metric: Robustness. Based on experimental results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of existing model editing approaches, and identify new challenges and research directions for the future development of the model editing field within the context of multimodal and video paradigms. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Sakabamrisa/VMEB.
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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
Yilin Zhang, Yingkai Hua, Chunyu Wei Renmin University of China, Xin Wang, Yueguo Chen Renmin University of China
Vision-language model (VLM) based web agents demonstrate impressive autonomous GUI interaction but remain vulnerable to deceptive interface elements. Existing approaches either detect deception without task integration or document attacks without proposing defenses. We formalize deception-aware web agent defense and propose DUDE (Deceptive UI Detector Evaluator), a two-stage framework combining hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. We introduce RUC (Real UI Clickboxes), a benchmark of 1,407 scenarios spanning four domains and deception categories. Experiments show DUDE reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment.
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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
Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li Shanghai University of Electric Power, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan Hefei University of Technology, Xiaofeng He East China Normal University, Chengyu Wang Independent Researcher and Alibaba Group, Richang Hong Hefei University of Technology
Despite substantial advances in large language models (LLMs), producing factually consistent responses for knowledge-intensive question answering remains challenging. These difficulties are primarily due to hallucination and the limitations of LLMs in bridging long-tail knowledge gaps. To address this, we propose AMATA, an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that dynamically integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. Our architecture leverages six specialized agents that collaboratively perform structured actions for complex question reasoning. We formalize multi-agent collaboration with external tools as a trajectory preference alignment problem, incorporating question-aware agent customization and inter-agent preference harmonization. AMATA introduces two principal innovations: (1) Intra-Trajectory Preference Learning, which learns objective-oriented preferences to prioritize critical agents, and (2) Inter-Agent Dependency Learning, which captures cross-agent tool dependencies through a novel dependency-aware direct preference optimization technique. Empirical results show that AMATA consistently outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrates the efficiency of our method in reducing token consumption.
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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
Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan Hefei University of Technology, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He East China Normal University, Chengyu Wang Independent Researcher and Alibaba Group, Richang Hong Hefei University of Technology
Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable collaborative capabilities across complex tasks. To enhance the overall efficiency, existing methods often rely on aggressive graph topology evolution for agents (e.g., node or edge pruning), which risks prematurely discarding valuable agents due to transient issues such as hallucinations or temporary knowledge gaps. However, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for “zombie” agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. In this paper, we propose AgentRevive, a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution. Our approach dynamically manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions, implemented via two key components: (1) State-Aware Policy Learning: Agent states are divided into “Active”, “Standby”, and “Terminated”, selectively propagating messages based on agent memory. The policy employs a risk estimator to optimize agent state transitions by assessing hallucination risk, minimizing the influence of unreliable nodes while safeguarding valuable ones. (2) State-Aware Edge Optimization: Subgraph edges are pruned according to states learned from the policy, permanently removing “Terminated” nodes and retaining “Standby” nodes for subsequent rounds to observe potential future contributions. Extensive experiments on general reasoning, domain-specific, and hallucination challenge tasks show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling.
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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
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
Qiao Liang, Ying Shen Tongji University, Yao Liu, Tiantian Chen, Lin Zhang IEIT SYSTEMS (Beijing) Co., Ltd. and Tongji University
Multimodal Emotion–Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations (MECTEC) is fundamental for fine-grained affect understanding, yet it remains challenging in multi-turn, multi-speaker settings. Existing methods often make locally plausible predictions but struggle to maintain conversation-level consistency under within-speaker emotion shifts and core events. To address this, we propose ECFlow, a unified framework that combines appraisal-guided structured generation with graph-structured reinforcement learning. ECFlow operationalizes cognitive appraisal theory into a controllable intermediate reasoning trace and constructs UMECS, a unified supervision dataset with cognitively grounded traces. It then lifts predicted and gold triplets into an Emotion–Cause Flow Graph and optimizes verifiable, structure-aware rewards for emotion-shift coherence and core-event consistency, together with task-oriented triplet rewards. Experiments on public MECTEC benchmarks show that ECFlow consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art triplet extraction and improved structure-aware metrics on emotion shifts and core events. Our code and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ECFlow-E908.
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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