Language models are increasingly used in text generation, decision support, and automated interaction, creating a need for localized, reversible, and selective control of their behavior. Activation steering demonstrates that internal interventions can alter the behavior of frozen models, but how to select and evaluate compact, multi-site control interfaces remains an open question. I introduce sparse internal control, a framework for steering target behavior by applying inference-time interventions to a small set of internal model nodes. A local target-controllability formulation characterizes candidate site--direction pairs by their behavioral effects and specifies constraints on target recovery, off-target preservation, and intervention energy. Two complementary selectors instantiate this formulation: Driver-OMP selects nodes for sparse reconstruction of a desired behavioral displacement, while Coverage-Driver favors stable coverage across prompts. I propose a six-axis control-evaluation protocol measuring reachability, signed reversal, dose response, feedback controllability, off-target preservation, and held-out reuse. Exploratory experiments on indirect object identification, MMLU multiple-choice question answering, sentiment steering, and refusal steering provide evidence for the feasibility of steering task-defined behavior through sparse internal interventions. The six-axis evaluation characterizes these interventions beyond target movement, revealing distinct control properties that depend on the task and available direction information. Together, the formulation, reference algorithms, and evaluation protocol provide a foundation for the systematic study and development of internal control methods for language models.
Zhiheng Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bohan Yu, Daojian Zeng Hunan Normal University, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science
LLM-based Multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of domains. Their success largely hinges on the collaboration topology design, which has emerged as a central research focus in the automated MAS design.However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on homogeneous LLMs, which significantly limits overall system intelligence.In response to this limitation, we for the first time propose the concept of Automated Design of Heterogeneous-LLMs-based MAS (ADHM).ADHM sheds light on a promising avenue for advancing collective intelligence, which focuses on the automated design of cost-effective MAS composed of diverse LLMsand roles to suit various queries.Toward this challenging goal, we propose Hetero-Designer, a novel pipeline that efficiently encodes intricate dependencies among queries, LLMs and roles through a novel Binary-Star Transformer and constructs Hetero-MAS in an autoregressive graph generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hetero-Designer is: (1) high-performing on various benchmarks, (2) economical in reducing overhead, (3) extensible to unseen LLMs and roles.
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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
Yuzhe Zhang Beijing University of Technology, Xianwei Xue, Xingyong Wu, Mengke Chen Baidu, Chen Liu Baidu, Xinran He, Run Shao, Feiran Liu College of Computer Science 等 11 位作者
Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking–Verification–Action–Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.
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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
Yuzhe Zhang Beijing University of Technology, Feiran Liu College of Computer Science, Yi Shan Beijing University of Technology, Xinyi Huang, Xin Yang Kuaishou- 快手科技 and Zhejiang University, Yueqi Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu 等 11 位作者
Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems to overcome context limitations by distributing information across agents. However, whether LLM-based agents can reliably coordinate when each observes only a fragment of the global problem remains unclear. Existing benchmarks often prescribe agent roles or interaction patterns, conflating coordination ability with role-based priors. We introduce SILO-BENCH, a role-free benchmark for evaluating free-form collaboration under information silos. The benchmark comprises 30 algorithmic tasks with exact ground-truth answers, organized into 3 complexity levels based on optimal communication complexity: aggregation, mesh, and global shuffle. To systematically probe coordination capabilities, we instantiate 54 configurations by varying 3 communication protocols, 6 agent scales and 3 frontier LLMs, conducting 1,620 experiments. We evaluate agent behavior along three dimensions: Success Rate, Token Consumption, and Communication Density. Our experiments reveal a fundamental Communication-Reasoning Gap: agents communicate actively, yet fail to translate interaction into effective distributed computation. Performance collapses as complexity increases, with Level-III tasks achieving zero success beyond 50 agents. These findings demonstrate that current LLMs cannot escape information silos through coordination alone. SILO-BENCH provides a foundation for tracking progress toward genuinely collaborative multi-agent systems. The code is available at https://github.com/jwyjohn/acl26-silo-bench.
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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
Yi Jiang, Sendong Zhao, Jianbo Li, Haochun Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Lizhe Zhang, Yan Liu, Bing Qin Harbin Institute of Technology
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs), especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. Despite its advantages, current RAG methods often struggle to fully exploit knowledge during generation. In particular, the synergy between the model’s internal parametric knowledge and external retrieved knowledge remains limited. Retrieved contents may sometimes mislead generation, while certain generated content can guide the model toward more accurate outputs. In this work, we propose Collaborative Chain-of-Agents, a framework designed to enhance explicitly synergy over both parametric and retrieved knowledge. Specifically, we first introduce CoCoA-zero, a multi-agent RAG framework that first performs conditional knowledge induction and then reasons answers. Building on this, we develop CoCoA, a long-chain training strategy that synthesizes extended multi-agent reasoning trajectories from CoCoA-zero to fine-tune the LLM. This strategy enhances the model’s capability to explicitly integrate and jointly leverage parametric and retrieved knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of CoCoA in open-domain QA and multi-hop QA.
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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
Generative speech technologies are progressing rapidly, but evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech remains a core challenge. Existing methods typically rely on scalar scores or binary decisions, which lack interpretability and generalization across tasks and languages. We present SpeechLLM-as-Judges, a new paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to conduct structured and explanation-based speech quality evaluation. To support this direction, we introduce SpeechEval, a large-scale dataset containing 32,207 multilingual speech clips and 128,754 annotations spanning four tasks: quality assessment, pairwise comparison, improvement suggestion, and deepfake detection. Based on this resource, we develop SQ-LLM, a speech-quality-aware LLM trained with chain-of-thought reasoning and reward optimization to improve capability. Experimental results show that SQ-LLM delivers strong performance across tasks and languages, revealing the potential of this paradigm for advancing speech quality evaluation. The relevant code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/SpeechLLM-as-Judges.
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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
Leyi Pan Tsinghua University, Shuchang Tao Alibaba Group, Yunpeng Zhai Alibaba Group, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang University of Illinois at Chicago, Minghua He Peking University, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu 等 11 位作者
Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, existing dLLM policy optimization methods suffer from two critical reliability bottlenecks: (1) reward sparsity, arising from coarse or unverifiable signals that impede accurate advantage calculation; and (2) their probability estimates do not account for the gap to the unbiased expectation over all decoding orders, which are intractable to compute. To mitigate these issues, we propose d-TreeRPO, a reliable RL framework for dLLMs that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards to provide fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical proof demonstrating that increasing prediction confidence effectively minimizes the gap between unbiased expected prediction probabilities and its single-step forward pass estimate. Guided by this analysis, we introduce a time-scheduled self-distillation loss during training that enhances prediction confidence in later training stages, thereby enabling more accurate probability estimation and better performance. Experiments demonstrate that d-TreeRPO outperforms existing baselines and achieves significant improvements across multiple reasoning benchmarks. Specifically, it achieves +86.2% on Sudoku, +51.6% on Countdown, +4.5% on GSM8K, and +5.3% on Math500 compared to the base model.
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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
OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents
Xingyao Wang, Boxuan Li, Yufan Song, Frank F. Xu, Xiangru Tang, Mingchen Zhuge, Jiayi Pan, Yueqi Song 等 24 位作者
AI 速览：OpenHands是一个开源平台，用于构建和评估能像人类开发者一样编写代码、操作命令行和浏览网页的AI智能体。
Software is one of the most powerful tools that we humans have at our disposal; it allows a skilled programmer to interact with the world in complex and profound ways. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. In this paper, we introduce OpenHands (f.k.a. OpenDevin), a platform for the development of powerful and flexible AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a human developer: by writing code, interacting with a command line, and browsing the web. We describe how the platform allows for the implementation of new agents, safe interaction with sandboxed environments for code execution, coordination between multiple agents, and incorporation of evaluation benchmarks. Based on our currently incorporated benchmarks, we perform an evaluation of agents over 15 challenging tasks, including software engineering (e.g., SWE-BENCH) and web browsing (e.g., WEBARENA), among others. Released under the permissive MIT license, OpenHands is a community project spanning academia and industry with more than 2.1K contributions from over 188 contributors.