Jinghong Chen, Jingbiao Mei, Guangyu Yang, Bill Byrne
A common approach to question answering with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is to concatenate documents into a single context and pass it to a language model to generate an answer. While simple, this strategy can obscure the contribution of individual documents, making attribution difficult and contributing to the ``lost-in-the-middle'' effect, where relevant information in long contexts is overlooked. Concatenation also scales poorly: computational cost grows quadratically with context length, a problem that becomes especially severe when the context includes visual data, as in visual question answering. Attempts to mitigate these issues by limiting context length can further restrict performance by preventing models from benefiting from the improved recall offered by deeper retrieval. We propose Bayesian Ensemble Retrieval-Augmented Generation (BERAG), along with Bayesian Ensemble Fine-Tuning (BEFT), as a RAG framework in which language models are conditioned on individual retrieved documents rather than a single combined context. BERAG treats document posterior probabilities as ensemble weights and updates them token by token using Bayes' rule during generation. This approach enables probabilistic re-ranking, parallel memory usage, and clear attribution of document contribution, making it well-suited for large document collections. We evaluate BERAG and BEFT primarily on knowledge-based visual question answering tasks, where models must reason over long, imperfect retrieval lists. The results show substantial improvements over standard RAG, including strong gains on Document Visual Question Answering and multimodal needle-in-a-haystack benchmarks. We also demonstrate that BERAG mitigates the ``lost-in-the-middle'' effect. The document posterior can be used to detect insufficient grounding and trigger deflection, while document pruning enables faster decoding than standard RAG.
Zitian Gao, Yilong Chen, Yihao Xiao, Xinyu Yang, Ran Tao, Joey Zhou, Bryan Dai
We present Loopie, the most powerful open-source looped Transformer to date. The Loopie series consists of two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models: a 20B-parameter model with 2B active parameters and a 6B parameter model with 0.6B active parameters. Looped Transformers have long faced a challenge: given an N-fold pre-training compute, increasing the parameter count by a factor of N usually outperforms looping N times. Loopie addresses this challenge. Extensive ablation studies, including comparisons with a vanilla 30B-A3B model, show that Loopie substantially outperforms vanilla Transformer baselines trained with the same compute budget. With a novel post-training method, Loopie develops strong reasoning abilities and achieves frontier-level reasoning performance.
Sungkyu Yang Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Kang-Min Kim Kyung Hee University, Mansu Kim Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology
Generating radiology reports from 3D volumetric data remains challenging due to the difficulty of grounding fine-grained pathologies within high-dimensional scans. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential solution, standard approaches struggle with visual-semantic ambiguity and often introduce irrelevant “normal” context that dilutes pathological signals. To address this limitation, we introduce CPR-RAG, a model-agnostic RAG framework that enhances organ-level grounding by integrating clinical priors into the retrieval process. Specifically, we propose a clinical prior-regularized re-ranking module that leverages corpus-derived co-occurrence statistics to align retrieved candidates with latent disease distributions, ensuring clinical consistency beyond mere visual similarity. Furthermore, we employ clinical relevance context refinement to selectively filter out boilerplate normal descriptions, thereby maximizing the information density of the evidence provided to the generator. Extensive experiments on the RadGenome-ChestCT benchmark demonstrate that CPR-RAG significantly improves clinical efficacy across state-of-the-art radiology report generation models. Human evaluation further confirms that our approach achieves superior factual correctness, completeness, and utility compared to the existing models.
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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
Boci Peng, Xiao Liu University of Macau and Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology, Zhuhai, China, Boren Hu, Yun Zhu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Xuanbo Fan Peking University, Yanwei Yue Peking University, Chunyu Yang, Yan Zhang Peking University
Retrieving coherent evidence subgraphs is critical for Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). Existing paradigms often treat facts independently, rely on biased heuristics, or employ myopic search, failing to optimize collective subgraph utility. In this paper, we propose COSMOS (Connectivity-Oriented Submodular Maximization for Optimal Subgraph Retrieval), a unified framework that formalizes evidence retrieval as a constrained submodular maximization problem. This formulation mathematically captures the trade-off between information relevance and structural complexity. To tractably solve this combinatorial challenge, COSMOS employs a decompose-and-conquer strategy, which first performs a seed-guided greedy expansion to maximize local semantic utility, followed by a topology-aware component aggregation to bridge disjoint evidence clusters via Maximum Spanning Tree aggregation. Guided by theoretical bounds, we introduce Structure-Aware Contrastive Tuning to align semantic space with KG topology. Experimental results on WebQSP, CWQ, and \text{M}^3\text{GQA} benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS achieves state-of-the-art 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
Yilong Chen, Zitian Gao Ubiquant, Yihao Xiao, Jason Klein Liu, Xinyu Yang Carnegie Mellon University, Yifan Luo Peking University, Haoming Luo, Zhengmao Ye 等 11 位作者
Although the Universal Transformer (UT) mitigates the diminishing returns of standard LLM scaling by decoupling parameter count from depth, it remains constrained by linear computational costs and rigid weight-sharing mechanisms. These limitations lead to severe functional homogeneity, which subsequently induces over-smoothing, representation rank collapse, and degraded reasoning performance. In this work, we present the first systematic study of Compute Distribution Skew, identifying it as the primary driver of extrapolation failure. This is a pathological phenomenon in ultra-deep recurrent Transformers characterized by a disproportionate distribution of contributions across recurrent steps, resulting in distinct functional states during prefix and suffix processing phases. To address this challenge, we propose the Polymorphic Transformer, which aims to achieve functional polymorphism and depth sparsity within a shared-parameter framework. By integrating conditional sparse subspaces, SiLU Attention, and an uncertainty-aware depth scheduler, our architecture mitigates power-method collapse and effectively decouples logical depth from computational cost. Experiments demonstrate that our model significantly enhances representation rank and robustness, achieving complex reasoning performance comparable to baseline while reducing computation by 64.7%.
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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
Guangyu Yang University of Cambridge, Jinghong Chen, Jingbiao Mei, Weizhe Lin Huawei Technologies Ltd., Bill Byrne Amazon and University of Cambridge
Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which attempt to elicit harmful responses from LLMs. The evolving nature and diversity of these attacks pose many challenges for defense systems, including (1) adaptation to counter emerging attack strategies without costly retraining, and (2) control of the trade-off between safety and utility. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Defense (RAD), a novel framework for jailbreak detection that incorporates a database of known attack examples into Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which is used to infer the underlying, malicious user query and jailbreak strategy used to attack the system. RAD enables training-free updates for newly discovered jailbreak strategies and provides a mechanism to balance safety and utility. Experiments on StrongREJECT show that RAD substantially reduces the effectiveness of strong jailbreak attacks such as PAP and PAIR while maintaining low rejection rates for benign queries. We propose a novel evaluation scheme and show that RAD achieves a robust safety-utility trade-off across a range of operating points in a controllable manner.
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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
Tianyu Yang, Sihong Wu, Yilun Zhao Yale University, Zhenwen Liang Tencent AI Lab, Lisen Dai Columbia University, Chen Zhao NYU Shanghai, Minhao Cheng Pennsylvania State University, Arman Cohan Yale University and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence 等 9 位作者
Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has recently attracted increasing attention for its capability to solve mathematical problems involving both textual and visual modalities. However, current models still face significant challenges in real-world visual math tasks, often misinterpreting diagrams, failing to align mathematical symbols with visual evidence, or producing inconsistent reasoning steps. Moreover, existing evaluations mainly focus on checking final answers rather than verifying the correctness or executability of each intermediate step. A growing body of recent research addresses these issues by integrating structured perception, explicit alignment, and verifiable reasoning within unified frameworks.To establish a clear roadmap for understanding and comparing different MMR approaches, we systematically review them around four fundamental questions: (1) What to extract from multimodal inputs, (2) How to represent and align textual and visual information, (3) How to perform the reasoning, and (4) How to evaluate the correctness of the overall reasoning process. Finally, we discuss open challenges and share our thoughts on future research directions.
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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
Quyu Kong Alibaba Group, Xu Zhang Alibaba Group, Zhenyu Yang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nolan Gao, Chen Liu The University of Queensland, Panrong Tong Alibaba Cloud, Chenglin Cai Alibaba Group, Hanzhang Zhou 等 13 位作者
While AndroidWorld has become the dominant mobile-use benchmark due to its reproducible environment and deterministic evaluation, recent agents achieving over 90% success rates indicate saturation and motivate the need for greater challenge. In addition, its environment lacks key application categories, such as e-commerce and enterprise communication, and does not reflect realistic mobile-use scenarios characterized by vague user instructions and hybrid tool usage. We introduce MobileWorld, a substantially more challenging benchmark with 201 tasks across 20 applications that reflects real-world usage through long-horizon, cross-application workflows requiring nearly twice as many steps (27.8 vs. 14.3) and featuring significantly more multi-app tasks (62.2% vs. 9.5%) than AndroidWorld. MobileWorld balances production-grade utility and reproducible evaluation using open-source alternatives to industry standards (e.g., Mattermost for Slack), enabling full observability through source code modification and direct database access. Beyond standard GUI manipulation, MobileWorld introduces novel task categories including agent-user interaction and Model Context Protocol (MCP)-augmented tasks for evaluating agents in user-aware, hybrid-tool scenarios. We develop a planner-executor framework with extended action spaces supporting user interactions and MCP calls. Results show a sharp performance drop from AndroidWorld, with the best agentic framework and end-to-end model achieving 51.7% and 20.9% success rates, respectively, highlighting substantial room for future research.
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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
Yaxun Dai Soochow University, Wenxuan Xie, Xialie Zhuang, Tianyu Yang Meituan, Ziyi Liu Soochow University, Haiqin Yang, Yiying Yang, Yuhang Zhao 等 10 位作者
Current Text-to-SQL reasoning models often lack integrated execution feedback during generation, and most existing approaches utilize feedback only for post-hoc correction. This separation not only limits real-time error correction, but may also introduce mistakes by altering otherwise correct SQL queries. To address these challenges, we present ReEx-SQL (Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning), a Text-to-SQL framework that interacts with the SQL execution engine during decoding and dynamically adjusts reasoning based on execution feedback, thereby enabling context-sensitive query refinement and improved accuracy. ReEx-SQL achieves this through structured prompts with markup tags and a stepwise rollout strategy that incorporates execution feedback at each generation stage. For policy supervision, we design a composite reward function—featuring an exploration reward—to explicitly encourage effective interaction with the database. Furthermore, ReEx-SQL adopts a tree-based decoding strategy to facilitate exploratory reasoning and primarily aims to enhance parallel decoding efficiency. Notably, ReEx-SQL achieves 89.1% accuracy on Spider and 65.3% on BIRD at the 7B scale, surpassing baseline models by 2.7% and 2.6%, respectively. In addition, its tree-based decoding accelerates inference by 51.9% compared to linear decoding during sampling.
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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
Chuanxin Zhang, Jiajun Liu, Yao He, Wenjun Ke Southeast University, Peng Wang, Yankun Le, Sirui Liu, Zhaoyu Yang
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a crucial paradigm for enhancing large language model (LLM) performance on multi-step reasoning tasks.However, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs invoke knowledge and propagate information across different steps of the CoT are poorly understood.To fill this gap, we propose a multi-stage probing framework that enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution.The framework integrates attention knockout to trace cross-layer information flow and theorem probing to examine how specific contents are encoded within representations.To enable controlled and stage-aligned analysis, we construct a structured CoT dataset that covers the mathematics and physics domains. Experiments on four instruction-tuned LLMs reveal distinct stage-specific patterns.First, keyword information is progressively aggregated into the final token in later layers.Second, theorem semantics are encoded in the mid-to-late layers and undergo two stages of propagation.Finally, parameter substitution is achieved through joint extraction by the final token and other tokens.The first parameter predominantly relies on the final token, whereas later parameters increasingly depend on information extracted by other tokens.Overall, our findings shed light on the neural implementation of CoT reasoning and provide actionable insights for developing more interpretable and reasoning-capable LLMs.We further evaluate a free-form prompting setting without labeled fields and observe consistent qualitative trends.
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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
Xinyu Yang, Chenlong Deng Renmin University of China, Zhicheng Dou Renmin University of China
Legal judgment prediction serves as a pivotal task in intelligent judicial systems. Although large language models have achieved remarkable progress in general reasoning, they struggle with tasks that require fine-grained distinctions between similar charges. These models often select plausible charges directly without discriminating among closely related alternatives. In this paper, we introduce GLARE, an agentic legal reasoning framework that enables models to actively retrieve and apply external knowledge during decision-making. Unlike static prediction, GLARE simulates comparative reasoning by dynamically expanding the decision space to include confusing candidates, then retrieving exclusionary logic from precedents and statutes to identify the correct judgment. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines, especially on complex cases involving confusing or rare charges. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GLARE-LJP-8EDF.
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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
Tianyu Yang Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Terry Ruas Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Yijun Tian, Jan Philip Wahle Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Daniel Kurzawe Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Bela Gipp Georg-August Universität Göttingen
While Vision–language models (VLMs) interpret text-rich images effectively, they struggle with reasoning across long, multi-page documents. We present \textbf{A}ctive \mathbf{L}ong \mathbf{D}ocum\mathbf{E}nt \mathbf{N}avigation (ALDEN), a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes VLMs as interactive agents capable of actively navigating long, visually rich documents rather than passive readers. ALDEN features a novel fetch action that allows direct page indexing, complementing the classic \textbf{search} action and better exploiting document structure. To ensure training efficiency and stability, we introduce a rule-based cross-level reward for dense supervision and a visual-semantic anchoring mechanism utilizing dual-path KL-divergence constraints. We train ALDEN on a curated corpus built from open-source datasets where trivial samples are filtered, and queries are rewritten to incentivize multi-turn navigation and fetch usage. Empirically, ALDEN achieves state-of-the-art results on five long-document benchmarks, offering a more accurate and efficient path for long-document understanding.
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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
Jianwen Chen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Xinyu Yang Carnegie Mellon University, Peng Xia Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Arian Azarang University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yueh Z Lee University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gang Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 等 10 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance and rapid progress in a wide range of medical reasoning tasks.However, their sequential autoregressive decoding forces inherently parallel clinical reasoning, such as differential diagnosis, into a single linear reasoning path, limiting both efficiency and reliability for complex medical problems.To address this, we propose MedVerse, a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph (DAG) process based on Petri Net theory.The framework adopts a full-stack design across data, model architecture, and system execution.For data creation, we introduce the MedVerse Curator, an automated pipeline that synthesizes knowledge-grounded medical reasoning path and transforms them into Petri Net–structured representations.At the architectural level, we propose a topology-aware attention mechanism with adaptive position indices that supports parallel reasoning while preserving logical consistency.Systematically, we develop a customized inference engine that supports parallel execution without additional overhead.Empirical evaluations show that MedVerse improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9%. Compared to specialized medical LLMs, MedVerse achieves comparable performance with improved clinical reliability, while delivering a 1.3\times reduction in inference latency and a 1.7\times increase in generation throughput, enabled by its parallel decoding capability.
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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
Yibo Peng, James Song, Lei Li, Xinyu Yang Carnegie Mellon University, Mihai Christodorescu Google, Ravi Mangal Colorado State University, Corina Pasareanu, Haizhong Zheng CMU, Carnegie Mellon University 等 9 位作者
Code agents are increasingly trusted to autonomously fix bugs on platforms such as GitHub, yet their security evaluation focuses almost exclusively on functional correctness. In this paper, we reveal a novel type of threat to real-world code-agents: functionally correct yet vulnerable (FCV) patches, which pass all test cases but contain vulnerable code. With our proposed FCV-Attack, we demonstrate that SOTA LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT and Claude) and agent scaffolds (e.g., SWE-agent and OpenHands) are all vulnerable to this FCV threat; across 12 agent-model combinations on SWE-Bench, the attack only requires black-box access and a single query to the code agent to perform the attack. For example, for CWE-538 (information exposure vulnerability), the FCV-Attack attains an attack success rate of 40.7% on GPT-5 Mini + OpenHands. Our results reveal an important security threat overlooked by current evaluation paradigms and urge the development of security-aware defenses for code agents.
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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