Wenjie Huang, Jun Zhang, Hongyaoxing Gu, Haoyang Huang, Tianqi Xu, Xinyue Hao, Xinyi Hu, Xinle Du 等 13 位作者
Multi-turn conversations with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reuse input context, but long multimodal inputs increase time to first token (TTFT). Query-aware hard pruning reduces prefill tokens but permanently excludes information that later questions may require. We propose Raincheck, a framework for deferred multimodal prefill that decouples initial token selection from later information availability. An existing pruning method selects tokens for initial prefill; Raincheck preserves and progressively prefills unselected tokens in source order using unused compute capacity during decode. Unfinished prefill continues after answer return during available scheduling gaps. Attention visibility control and affine state mapping enable context updates after generation begins in full-attention and hybrid recurrent models. Prefill-decode fusion reduces repeated weight reads. We evaluate Qwen3-VL-8B and Qwen3.5-9B with 30% initial multimodal-token retention. Across both models and four pruning methods, Raincheck recovers on average 77.7% and 60.4% of the quality lost to matched hard pruning on MultiVerse and ConvBench, respectively. On MultiVerse, the SGLang implementation reduces mean first-turn TTFT by up to 24.1% relative to full prefill, with less than 0.5% increase in mean time per output token (TPOT).
Large language models often answer structurally unanswerable questions, such as computing cot(-540°) or evaluating (1).startswith("1"), instead of abstaining. We ask whether this failure reflects missing recognition or failed routing from recognition to abstention. Across instruction-tuned models from 1.7B to 70B parameters, a single linear direction in the hidden state separates answerable from structurally impossible math and code prompts, showing that models represent impossibility before generation. Yet this recognition direction is nearly orthogonal to the canonical safety-refusal direction that mediates trained harmful-content refusal. An in-domain behavior-defined invalidity-aware direction is closer to recognition, but only partially aligned with it, and remains near-orthogonal to safety refusal. Generation-time steering along the recognition direction changes invalidity-aware behavior bidirectionally and dose-responsively on structural math and code cells, while random directions do not. Base/instruct comparisons further show that the low-cosine geometry is already present at the pretraining endpoint. The confident-on-impossible failure is therefore better explained as a routing failure than as an encoding failure: the model has a usable "no admissible answer" signal, but the safety-refusal pathway is not aligned to use it.
Xuan He, Sining Zhoubian, Ruozhen Yang, Yuhao Wen, Zhineng Wang, Yuyang Hu, Ke Yang, Yuyu Zhang 等 11 位作者
Memory is increasingly used in long-horizon agents, yet the net value of building memory over direct retrieval from raw history remains largely unclear. Through a large-scale evaluation across multiple benchmarks and model backbones, we find many dedicated memory systems underperform naive RAG in many cases, indicating a negative net value. Taking RAG as a reference, we dissect the net value of memory into the gains and losses over direct retrieval, termed memory benefit and memory tax. These gains and losses arise because memory process changes how the raw information is organized and accessed. We view such changes as the double-edged deviations from the raw history. They are originally designed and introduced to benefit the task, for example by reorganizing facts or distilling preferences, but some may also remove or obscure evidence, giving rise to memory tax. Since memory benefit reflects the expected gains of its design, we then focus more on the overlooked memory tax, study how it arises from the system and evaluation side, and generalize the concept to more application scenarios of memory. We hope the notion of memory tax can provide a new lens and shift more attention from standalone performance to the net value of memory, informing more reliable memory designs and evaluations. We will open-source the code and results to the community. Project Page: https://hexuan21.github.io/MemoryTax/
Xiaowei Yuan, Lei Jin, Haoxin Zhang, Ziyang Huang, Yan Gao, Yiwu, Yao Hu, Jun Zhao 等 9 位作者
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) plays a critical role in user-generated content (UGC) platforms, but its effectiveness critically depends on accurate query–document relevance assessment. Despite recent advances in applying large language models (LLMs) to relevance modeling, UGC platforms present unique challenges: 1) ambiguous user intent due to sparse user feedback in RAG scenarios, and 2) asymmetric relevance, where relevance is driven by localized answer-bearing content rather than global query–document similarity. To address these issues, we propose the Reinforced Reasoning model for Relevance Assessment (R³A), which decomposes relevance assessment into intent inference and evidence grounding. R³A leverages auxiliary high-clicked documents to infer latent query intent, and extracts verbatim evidence fragments to ground relevance decisions, reducing noise sensitivity and improving asymmetric relevance modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that R³A substantially outperforms strong baselines on offline benchmarks, while the distilled R³A-1.5B model achieves significant gains in large-scale online A/B testing, effectively balancing performance and practical deployability.
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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
Xiaowei Yuan, Ziyang Huang, Zhao Yang Meituan, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, RAG performance often degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that Prior-Guided Reasoning—a strategy that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents—effectively mitigates the impact of external conflicts. Building on this, we propose BrPr (Bernoulli-gated reinforcement learning for Prior-Guided reasoning), a framework that achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency. Furthermore, by employing a Bernoulli-gated dropout mechanism during training, BrPr distills the prior-driven reasoning capability into the model parameters, enabling efficient latent reasoning without explicit prior generation. The experimental results demonstrate that BrPr consistently exhibits superior robustness to external conflicts and noise.
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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
Shufang Xie Renmin University of China, Qizhi Pei, Ang Lv, Jingyang Hu, Lijun Wu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rui Yan Wuhan University
AI development is often framed as the outcome of isolated research and engineering efforts, yet evidence from deployed systems suggests that language models interact through a shared data ecosystem. While the optimization of individual models is extensively studied, the emergent properties of this interconnected population remain largely unexplored, limiting our ability to predict long-term ecosystem trajectories We term this process data pollination, the unintentional circulation of synthetic model outputs through shared online platforms and web-scale training corpora, and formalize it as a population-based evolutionary framework to investigate stability dynamics under synthetic data training. Our theoretical analysis and controlled experiments involving 320 language models demonstrate that population dynamics can mitigate the model collapse observed in single-lineage recursive training, yielding stable or improving performance across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, we find that ecological diversity functions as a fundamental resilience mechanism that safeguards the ecosystem against collapse, highlighting the critical importance of maintaining model diversity for sustainable AI development.
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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
Xiang Wang, Zongtao Yang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zhuojian Hong Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shuhao Zhang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wei Wei Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Agentic workflows are commonly used to guide large language models in solving complex reasoning tasks. However, existing automated workflow generation methods primarily rely on stepwise local refinement or tree-based search over a single evolving workflow. Under limited optimization budgets, this paradigm constrains structural depth, hindering the discovery of workflows that require deep compositional structure. To address this limitation, we propose FusionFlow, a framework centered on workflow fusion. Unlike incremental refinement, fusion enables structural leaps by synthesizing multiple independently evolved workflows, allowing exploration of deeper regions of the workflow space within a finite budget. To make fusion effective, FusionFlow integrates local optimization, task-specific differentiation, and a dynamic scheduling mechanism. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FusionFlow consistently outperforms existing automated workflow generation methods. Further ablation and analysis confirm that fusion is the key driver of deep structural exploration, highlighting fusion-driven exploration as an effective approach for overcoming depth limitations in automated workflow generation.
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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
Mingqian Ding, Jianjun Li Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wenqi Yang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zhibo Zhang, Yushen Fang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for text-attributed graph (TAG) learning, yet effectively integrating LLM semantics with graph structural information remains challenging. Embeddings obtained from frozen LLMs lack topology awareness, while fine-tuning LLMs is often computationally expensive. Moreover, LLM embeddings are high-dimensional, and naively reducing dimensionality tends to destroy semantics. To address these issues, we propose GASE, a framework for learning Graph-Aware Semantic Embeddings using frozen LLMs. GASE consists of two key stages: First, we introduce a Training-Free Structure-Aware Semantic Extraction (TSSE) module. Through inter-layer semantic feedback and progressive masked attention, it efficiently compresses and propagates semantic context from neighboring nodes without updating LLM parameters. Second, we propose a Subspace Decomposition and Structural Injection (SDSI) strategy. Embeddings obtained from TSSE are decomposed into a semantic-rich subspace and a structural injection subspace, and structural signals are injected into the latter, which preserves original semantics while integrating graph information. Experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on node classification and achieves a 5× speedup over fine-tuning-based 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
Ruixuan Deng, Xiaoyang Hu Brown University, Miles Gilberti University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Shane Storks University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Aman Taxali University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Mike Angstadt University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Chandra Sripada University of Michigan, Joyce Chai
We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation prediction tasks, we show that ablating these components for concepts (e.g., countries and words) and relations (e.g., capital city and translation language) changes model outputs in predictable ways, while amplifying these components induces counterfactual responses. Notably, composing relation and concept components yields compound counterfactual outputs. Further analysis reveals that while most concept components emerge from the very first layer, more abstract relation components are concentrated in later layers. Lastly, we show that extracted components more comprehensively capture concepts and relations than individual features while maintaining specificity. Overall, our findings suggest a modular organization of knowledge and advance methods for efficient, targeted LLM manipulation.
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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
Siqing Song, Chuang Wang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yong Lang Huawei Technologies Ltd., Yi Yang Huawei Technologies Ltd., Xu-Yao Zhang
Deploying large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments is hindered by heavy computational and memory requirements. We present LBLLM, a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. The framework proceeds as follows: (1) initialize a high-quality quantized model via PTQ; (2) quantize binarized weights, group-wise bitmaps, and quantization parameters through layer-wise distillation while keeping activations in full precision; and (3) training learnable activation quantization factors to dynamically quantize activations to 4 bits. This decoupled design mitigates interference between weight and activation quantization, yielding greater training stability and better inference accuracy. LBLLM, trained only using 0.016B tokens with a single GPU, surpasses existing state-of-the-art binarization methods on W2A4 quantization settings across tasks of language modeling, commonsense QA, and language understanding. These results demonstrate that extreme low-bit quantization of LLMs can be both practical and highly effective without introducing any extra high-precision channels or rotational matrices commonly used in recent PTQ-based works, offering a promising path toward efficient LLM deployment in resource-limited situations.
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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
Wenqi Yang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Jianjun Li Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zhibo Zhang, Mingqian Ding, Yushen Fang
Multi-step reasoning remains challenging for language models with limited capacity. While recent reasoning distillation approaches transfer chain-of-thought supervision from large teacher models, they typically apply uniform supervision across all Transformer components, overlooking the fact that different modules contribute unequally to reasoning. We propose Module-Aware Reasoning Distillation, a parameter-efficient framework that explicitly targets key Transformer components for effective reasoning transfer. Through systematic analysis, we identify the feed-forward network projections and the output projection of self-attention as primary bottlenecks for reasoning. Based on these findings, we introduce lightweight adapter modules at these components while freezing the backbone parameters, enabling focused and efficient distillation. Our approach adopts an offline distillation setting, where a strong teacher model provides reasoning trajectories in advance, and incorporates an adaptive supervision strategy that adjusts the strength of reasoning-related losses according to problem difficulty. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, and ablation studies confirm the importance of both module-aware placement and adaptive supervision.
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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
Siyuan Li Peng Cheng Laboratory and Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Yunjia Wu, Yiyong Xiao Fudan University, Pingyang Huang, Peize Li, Ruitong Liu, Yan Wen, Te Sun
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting requires predicting future facts by jointly modeling structural dependencies within each snapshot and temporal evolution across snapshots. However, most existing methods are stateless: they recompute entity representations at each timestamp from a limited query window, leading to episodic amnesia and rapid decay of long-term dependencies. To address this limitation, we propose Entity State Tuning (EST), an encoder-agnostic framework that endows TKG forecasters with persistent and continuously evolving entity states. EST maintains a global state buffer and progressively aligns structural evidence with sequential signals via a closed-loop design. Specifically, a topology-aware state perceiver first injects entity-state priors into structural encoding. Then, a unified temporal context module aggregates the state-enhanced events with a pluggable sequence backbone. Subsequently, a dual-track evolution mechanism writes the updated context back to the global entity state memory, balancing plasticity against stability. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that EST consistently improves diverse backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the importance of state persistence for long-horizon TKG forecasting.
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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
Weiyang Huang Harbin Institute of Technology ,(Shenzhen), Xuefeng Bai, Kehai Chen Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Xinyang Chen Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Yibin Chen, Weili Guan, Min Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Harbin Institute of Technology
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have revolutionized complex problem-solving, yet they exhibit a pervasive “overthinking”, generating unnecessarily long reasoning chains. While current solutions improve token efficiency, they often sacrifice fine-grained control or risk disrupting the logical integrity of the reasoning process. To address this, we introduce Stepwise Adaptive Thinking (SAT), a framework that performs step-level, difficulty-aware pruning while preserving the core reasoning structure. SAT formulates reasoning as a Finite-State Machine (FSM) with distinct thinking modes (SLOW, NORMAL, FAST, SKIP). It navigates these states dynamically using a lightweight Process Reward Model (PRM), compressing easy steps while preserving depth for hard ones. Experiments across 9 LRMs and 7 benchmarks show that SAT achieves up to 40% reduction in reasoning tokens while generally maintaining or improving accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/byxw13/SAT_Code.
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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
Zheng Luo, T Pranav Kutralingam, Ogochukwu N. Okoani, Wanpeng Xu Arizona State University, Hua Wei Arizona State University, Xiyang Hu Arizona State University
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls. While recent work reports strong tool-calling performance under standard English-centric evaluations, the robustness of tool calling under multilingual user interactions remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce MLCL, a diagnostic benchmark, and conduct a systematic evaluation of multilingual tool calling across Chinese, Hindi, and the low-resource language Igbo. Through fine-grained error analysis, we show that many failures occur despite correct intent understanding and tool selection. We identify parameter value language mismatch as a dominant failure mode, where models generate semantically appropriate parameter values in the user’s language, violating language-invariant execution conventions. We further evaluate several inference-time system strategies and find that while these strategies substantially reduce language-induced execution errors, none of them can fully recover English-level performance.
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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
Tiancheng Xing National University of Singapore, Jerry Li, Yixuan Du, Xiyang Hu Arizona State University
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in information retrieval, yet their ranking behavior can be steered by small, natural-sounding prompts. To expose this vulnerability, we present Rank Anything First (RAF), a two-stage token optimization method that crafts concise textual perturbations to consistently promote a target item in LLM-generated rankings while remaining hard to detect. Stage 1 uses Greedy Coordinate Gradient to shortlist candidate tokens at the current position by combining the gradient of the rank-target with a readability score; Stage 2 evaluates those candidates under exact ranking and readability losses using an entropy-based dynamic weighting scheme, and selects a token via temperature-controlled sampling. RAF generates ranking-promoting prompts token-by-token, guided by dual objectives: maximizing ranking effectiveness and preserving linguistic naturalness. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that RAF significantly boosts the rank of target items using naturalistic language, with greater robustness than existing methods in both promoting target items and maintaining naturalness. These findings underscore a critical security implication: LLM-based reranking is inherently susceptible to adversarial manipulation, raising new challenges for the trustworthiness and robustness of modern retrieval systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/glad-lab/RAF.
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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
Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Wenbing Li, Junqing Yu Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen La Trobe University, Wei Yang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zikai Song
Logical reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs). However, existing studies largely overlook the interplay between logical complexity and semantic complexity, limiting their robustness under abstract propositions, ambiguous contexts, and conflicting stances, which are central to human reasoning. We propose LogicAgent, a semiotic-square–guided framework that jointly addresses these two axes of difficulty. The semiotic square provides a principled structure for multi-perspective semantic analysis, and LogicAgent integrates automated deduction with reflective verification to manage logical complexity across deeper reasoning chains. To evaluate reasoning under coupled semantic and logical complexity, we introduce RepublicQA, a benchmark that contains abstract propositions with systematically constructed contrary and contradictory forms, providing a semantically rich setting for assessing logical reasoning in LLMs. Experiments show that LogicAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance on RepublicQA with a 6.25% average gain, and generalizes well to four mainstream logical reasoning benchmarks with an additional 7.05% improvement, highlighting the effectiveness of our semiotic-grounded multi-perspective reasoning in boosting LLMs’ logical performance.
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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
Xinglang Zhang, Yunyao Zhang, ZeLiang Chen, Junqing Yu Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wei Yang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Zikai Song
Symbolic logical reasoning is a critical yet underexplored capability of large language models (LLMs), providing reliable and verifiable decision-making in high-stakes domains such as mathematical reasoning and legal judgment. In this study, we present a systematic analysis of logical reasoning under controlled increases in logical complexity, and reveal a previously unrecognized phenomenon, which we term Logical Phase Transitions: rather than degrading smoothly, logical reasoning performance remains stable within a regime but collapses abruptly beyond a critical logical depth, mirroring physical phase transitions such as water freezing beyond a critical temperature threshold. Building on this insight, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Curriculum Tuning, a principled framework that adaptively aligns natural language with logical symbols to establish a shared representation, and reshapes training dynamics around phase-transition boundaries to progressively strengthen reasoning at increasing logical depths. Experiments on five benchmarks show that our approach effectively mitigates logical reasoning collapse at high complexity, yielding average accuracy gains of +1.26 in naive prompting and +3.95 in CoT, while improving generalization to unseen logical compositions.
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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
Chenyang Huang, Osmar Zaiane University of Alberta
Non-autoregressive (NAR) models have been mainly developed to improve decoding efficiency. Lately, they have also shown great potential in controlled text generation tasks. In this work, we investigate the decoding space of NAR models through lexically constrained machine translation tasks, and develop a search-based decoding algorithm named LexMAP, which is comparable to the autoregressive Grid Beam Search (GBS) method. Our analysis reveals several interesting properties of NAR decoding: 1) the NAR-based method does not suffer from the MAP degradation issue as the autoregressive method does; 2) AR beam search exhibits strong positional bias, in which the candidates only diverge at the end of the sequence; 3) NAR search explores a larger portion of the probability space, suggesting that the search algorithm better exploits the model’s potential.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表