Xingyu Li, Rongguang Wang, Yuying Wang, Mengqing Guo, Chenyang Li, Tao Sheng, Sujith Ravi, Dan Roth
Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) is a practical bottleneck in industry applications such as enterprise assistants, customer-support copilots, and compliance analysis, where systems must combine evidence across multiple documents before answering. Large language models (LLMs) remain brittle in this setting: iterative retrieval can commit too early to low-recall trajectories, while planning-only approaches can produce static query sets that fail to adapt when intermediate evidence changes. We propose Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning RAG (PAR^2-RAG), a training-free two-stage framework that separates coverage from commitment. PAR^2-RAG first performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier, then applies depth-first refinement with evidence sufficiency control in an iterative loop. This design targets deployment constraints by avoiding retraining cycles, reducing maintenance overhead under changing corpora, and improving scalability across domains. Across four MHQA benchmarks, PAR^2-RAG consistently outperforms strong baselines: compared with IRCoT, it achieves up to 23.5% higher answer accuracy and up to 10.5% NDCG gains in retrieval quality.
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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
Xinmeng Hou, Bohao Qu A*STAR, Wuqi Wang Chang 'an University, Peiliang Gong Singapore University of Technology and Design and Nanyang Technological University, Qing Guo Nankai University and National University of Singapore, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University
While Large Language Models (LLMs) enable complex autonomous behavior, current agents remain constrained by static, human-designed prompts that limit adaptability. Existing self-improving frameworks attempt to bridge this gap but typically rely on inefficient, multi-turn recursive loops that incur high computational costs. To address this, we propose Metacognitive Agent with Reflective Self-improvement (MARS), a framework that achieves efficient self-evolution within a single recurrence cycle. Inspired by educational psychology, MARS mimics human learning by integrating principle-based reflection (abstracting normative rules to avoid errors) and procedural reflection (deriving step-by-step strategies for success). By synthesizing these insights into optimized instructions, MARS allows agents to systematically refine their reasoning logic without continuous online feedback. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that MARS outperforms state-of-the-art self-evolving systems while significantly reducing computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Paparare/MARS/tree/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
Jiawei Liu, Xun Gong Jilin University, China, Muli Yang A*STAR, Xingrui Yu Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore, A*STAR, Fen Fang, Xulei Yang I2R, A*STAR, Ivor Tsang, Yunfeng hu 等 10 位作者
Advancing from usable to collaborative autonomy requires driving systems to execute passenger instructions safely and reliably. This work formulates instruction realization as scheduling across multiple motion planners and presents a dual-loop framework that provides a transparent decision chain from natural language to vehicle control. The outer loop uses a small language model (SLM) for high-level, low-frequency semantic reasoning and schedule generation, while the inner loop performs low-level, high-frequency schedule execution and vehicle control. To compensate for the SLM’s limited capacity, the framework integrates receding-horizon scheduling to segment long-horizon instruction tasks, a domain-specific language (DSL) that restricts SLM outputs to a scheduling-oriented subspace, and reinforcement learning in high-fidelity urban traffic to refine the SLM’s DSL proficiency and scheduling performance. Experiments show that the framework improves instruction-completion rates while maintaining high safety and compliance relative to multiple baselines.
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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
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
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.
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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
Xueqing Peng Yale University, Lingfei Qian Yale University, Yan Wang Yale University, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He Columbia University, Yang Ren Yale University, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang 等 47 位作者
Real-world financial analysis involves information across multiple languages and modalities, from reports and news to scanned filings and meeting recordings. Yet most existing evaluations of LLMs in finance remain text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. To bridge these gaps, we present MultiFinBen, the first expert-annotated multilingual (five languages) and multimodal (text, vision, audio) benchmark for evaluating LLMs in realistic financial contexts. MultiFinBen introduces two new task families: multilingual financial reasoning, which tests cross-lingual evidence integration from filings and news, and financial OCR, which extracts structured text from scanned documents containing tables and charts. Rather than aggregating all available datasets, we apply a structured, difficulty-aware selection based on advanced model performance, ensuring balanced challenge and removing redundant tasks. Evaluating 21 leading LLMs shows that even frontier multimodal models like GPT-4o achieve only 46.01% overall, stronger on vision and audio but dropping sharply in multilingual settings. These findings expose persistent limitations in multilingual, multimodal, and expert-level financial reasoning. All datasets, evaluation scripts, and leaderboards are publicly released.
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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