Wenchao Du, Fangxin Shang, Long Wu, Runze Cui, Qing Yang, Yehui Yang
In high-stakes domains such as finance, critical information evolves through multi-party interaction. Recovering these changes and their sources is fundamental to reliable speech understanding. Existing speech benchmarks focus on transcription, local understanding, and turn-level state prediction, leaving joint decision evolution across speakers insufficiently evaluated. We introduce DecisionTraceBench, a speech state-tracking benchmark for Decision-Critical Information State Tracking (DCIST). It jointly evaluates decision event sequences, speaker attribution, scope, and temporal evidence, using trajectory-level F1 to measure complete event-chain recovery. Our dataset comprises Chinese financial dialogues involving two to four speakers, with 100.39 hours of synthetic audio and 8.61 hours of human-performed recordings. On a fixed cohort of human-performed recordings, five cascaded systems and two direct-audio models achieve DCIST scores of 5.73% to 21.35%. Ablations with speaker-labeled reference scripts and no temporal localization requirements yield a maximum score of only 38.72%. Audio perturbation experiments further show that overall transcription error rates do not adequately reflect complete trajectory recovery. These findings reveal limitations in jointly understanding information provenance and state evolution, providing a benchmark for evaluating decision-process understanding and decision traceability in high-stakes speech applications.
Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing Alibaba Group, Qingyi Si JD.com, Zhuoran Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Weikang Gong Fudan University, Deqing Yang Fudan University 等 10 位作者
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising critic-free reinforcement learning paradigm for reasoning tasks. However, standard GRPO employs a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. We address this limitation by introducing Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR), a fine-grained credit assignment mechanism that redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. We instantiate OAR via two complementary strategies: (1) OAR-P, which estimates outcome sensitivity through counterfactual token perturbations, serving as a high-fidelity attribution signal; (2) OAR-G, which uses an input-gradient sensitivity proxy to approximate the influence signal with a single backward pass. These importance signals are integrated with a conservative Bi-Level advantage reshaping scheme that suppresses low-impact tokens and boosts pivotal ones while preserving the overall advantage mass. Empirical results on extensive mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that while OAR-P sets the performance upper bound, OAR-G achieves comparable gains with negligible computational overhead, both significantly outperforming a strong GRPO baseline, pushing the boundaries of critic-free LLM reasoning.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qingqing Yang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Zhengzhou University, Haijiang Liu, Moyan Li
Linking FDA-approved medical devices to their underlying United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patents enables critical applications such as recall root-cause analysis, M&A-driven IP discovery, and technology trajectory mapping. However, this cross-domain entity linking task remains unexplored due to severe semantic gaps: FDA documents focus on clinical outcomes, while patents describe technical mechanisms, yielding minimal lexical overlap. We formalize medical device-patent linking as a challenging cross-domain entity linking problem characterized by label scarcity and domain shifts. Using cardiovascular devices as a high-impact, representative domain featuring diverse technologies, high recall rates, and abundant disclosures, we construct a benchmark with 434 devices, 698K patents, and 585 high-fidelity expert-verified pairs. To address these challenges, we propose Bridge-MedDevKG, a coarse-to-fine framework that integrates (1) MedDevOnto, a domain-specific ontology that anchors device concepts via three-tier UMLS normalization; (2) Multi-signal candidate generation fusing company affiliation, semantic similarity, and ontology-weighted entity overlap; and (3) Heterogeneous reranking with multi-signal scoring and XGBoost classification on hard negatives. Our approach achieves a conservative lower-bound recall of 91.6% on the gold standard with 50.9% noise reduction, substantially outperforming LLM baselines under comparable evaluation. The resulting MedDevKG provides 6.8M high-confidence links, laying a scalable foundation for regulatory-IP integration across medical specialties.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Guanglei Yue Fudan University, Qianyu He, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University, Deqing Yang Fudan University, Jiaqing Liang Fudan University
Quotation recommendation enriches writing by suggesting quotations that fit a given context, but prior systems largely focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. Based on a user study, we find that preferred quotations are often unexpected yet rational, motivating the goal of selecting quotes that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. We propose NovelQR, which (1) uses a generative label agent to map quotations and contexts into multi-dimensional deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval, and (2) reranks candidates with a token-level novelty estimator that mitigates auto-regressive continuation bias. Experiments on bilingual datasets across diverse domains show that NovelQR is preferred by human judges and improves overall recommendation quality over strong baselines, while achieving competitive novelty estimation.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sashuai Zhou Zhejiang University, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu Alibaba Group, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song Alibaba Group 等 12 位作者
Despite impressive progress in high-fidelity image synthesis, generative models still struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. Meanwhile, closed-source systems (e.g., Nano Banana) have demonstrated strong reasoning-driven image generation, highlighting a substantial gap to current open-source models. We argue that closing this gap requires not merely better visual generators, but executable reasoning: decomposing high-level intents into grounded, verifiable plans that directly steer the generative process. To this end, we propose Unified Thinker, a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation, designed as a unified planning core that can plug into diverse generators and workflows. Unified Thinker decouples a dedicated Thinker from the image Generator, enabling modular upgrades of reasoning without retraining the entire generative model. We further introduce a two-stage training paradigm: we first build a structured planning interface for the Thinker, then apply reinforcement learning to ground its policy in pixel-level feedback, encouraging plans that optimize visual correctness over textual plausibility. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation and image editing show that Unified Thinker substantially improves image reasoning and generation quality.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Lei Hsiung Dartmouth College, Tianyu Pang Dartmouth College, Yung-Chen Tang EPFL - EPF Lausanne and Idiap Research Institute, Linyue Song Asana Inc, Tsung-Yi Ho Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Pin-Yu Chen International Business Machines, Yaoqing Yang Dartmouth College
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have underscored their vulnerability to safety alignment jailbreaks, particularly when subjected to downstream fine-tuning. However, existing mitigation strategies primarily focus on reactively addressing jailbreak incidents after safety guardrails have been compromised, removing harmful gradients during fine-tuning, or continuously reinforcing safety alignment throughout fine-tuning. As such, they tend to overlook a critical upstream factor: the role of the original safety-alignment data. This paper therefore investigates the degradation of safety guardrails through the lens of representation similarity between upstream alignment datasets and downstream fine-tuning tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that high similarity between these datasets significantly weakens safety guardrails, making models more susceptible to jailbreaks. Conversely, low similarity between these two types of datasets yields substantially more robust models and thus reduces harmfulness score by up to 10.33%. By highlighting the importance of upstream dataset design in the building of durable safety guardrails and reducing real-world vulnerability to jailbreak attacks, these findings offer actionable insights for fine-tuning service providers to prioritize upstream models with low jailbreak risk.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuqing Yang University of Southern California, Qi Zhu Amazon, Zhen Han Amazon, Boran Han, Zhengyuan Shen Amazon, Shuai Wang Amazon, Vassilis N. Ioannidis AI Vista, Huzefa Rangwala Siemens Corporate Research
While large language models (LLMs) perform well on table tasks, they still make data referencing errors (DREs), i.e., incorrectly citing or omitting table values, despite understanding the table structure. Beyond final-answer accuracy, DREs directly compromise the correctness and reliability of intermediate reasoning steps. Yet prior studies have only offered limited, small-scale analyses. In this work, we present the first systematic evaluation of tabular data referencing errors across different models and tasks. Our results show that DREs occur across all tested models (1.7B to 20B parameters). Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating data referencing as a critic significantly improves answer accuracy up to 12.0%, through critic-based filtering and rejection sampling. Finally, we trained a lightweight 4B-parameter critic model that achieves an average F1 score of 78.2% in detecting both in-distribution and out-of-distribution DREs, and effectively assists inference for larger models.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hang Lv University of Science and Technology of China, Hongchao Gu, Ruiqing Yang, Liangyue Li Amazon, Zulong Chen, Defu Lian University of Science and Technology of China, Hao Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Enhong Chen University of Science and Technology of China
Generative listwise reranking leverages global context for superior retrieval but is plagued by intrinsic position bias, where models exhibit structural sensitivity to input order independent of relevance. Existing mitigations present a dilemma: inference-time aggregation incurs prohibitive latency, while training-based methods often fail to eradicate ingrained priors, particularly in compact models. To resolve this dilemma, we propose CapCal (Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration), a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions. By estimating the bias distribution via content-free placeholders, CapCal rectifies output logits through an entropy-adaptive contrastive mechanism. Evaluations across 10 benchmarks confirm that CapCal achieves superior performance among training-free methods while preserving single-pass efficiency. Notably, it unlocks the latent potential of lightweight models (e.g., 0.6B), delivering absolute NDCG gains exceeding 10 points and outperforming computationally expensive data augmentation strategies.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
AI 速览：提出 LongLLMLingua 提示压缩方法，旨在同时缓解长上下文场景下的计算成本高、性能下降和位置偏差三大问题。
In long context scenarios, large language models (LLMs) face three main challenges: higher computational cost, performance reduction, and position bias. Research indicates that LLM performance hinges on the density and position of key information in the input prompt. Inspired by these findings, we propose LongLLMLingua for prompt compression towards improving LLMs' perception of the key information to simultaneously address the three challenges. Our extensive evaluation across various long context scenarios demonstrates that LongLLMLingua not only enhances performance but also significantly reduces costs and latency. For instance, in the NaturalQuestions benchmark, LongLLMLingua boosts performance by up to 21.4% with around 4x fewer tokens in GPT-3.5-Turbo, leading to substantial cost savings. It achieves a 94.0% cost reduction in the LooGLE benchmark. Moreover, when compressing prompts of about 10k tokens at ratios of 2x-6x, LongLLMLingua can accelerate end-to-end latency by 1.4x-2.6x. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/LongLLMLingua.