YiFei Wang, Qizhi Pei, Jiangtao Feng, Yuntian Shi, Yi Duan, Lihao Wang, Lei Bai Shanghai AI Laboratory, Lijun Wu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 等 10 位作者
Multi-step retrosynthetic planning is a fundamental challenge in organic chemistry, traditionally modeled as a combinatorial search problem guided by single-step prediction models. However, this search-centric paradigm often disconnects from the explicit chemical reasoning processes employed by human experts. In this paper, we propose R^3 (Reinforced Reasoning Retrosynthesis), a novel framework that reformulates this task as end-to-end generative reasoning. Instead of traversing a search tree, R^3 simulates the problem-solving logic of chemists to directly generate complete synthetic pathways. To achieve this, we initialize the model with domain knowledge and employ end-to-end Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize the entire planning policy. Experimental results on Retrobench show that R^3 achieves a state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 43.7%, demonstrating that generative reasoning offers a superior alternative to traditional search algorithms in solving complex retrosynthetic problems.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yixiao Zhou, Dongzhou Cheng, Zhiliang wu Nanyang Technological University, Yi Yang Zhejiang University, Yu Cheng Skywork AI and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hehe Fan Zhejiang University
Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to utilize their latent reasoning capabilities due to a distributional mismatch between ambiguous human inquiries and the structured logic required for machine activation. Existing alignment methods either incur prohibitive O(N) costs by fine-tuning each model individually or rely on static prompts that fail to resolve query-level structural complexity. In this paper, we propose ReQueR (Reinforcement Query Refinement), a modular framework that treats reasoning elicitation as an inference-time alignment task. We train a specialized Refiner policy via Reinforcement Learning to rewrite raw queries into explicit logical decompositions, treating frozen LLMs as the environment. Rooted in the classical Zone of Proximal Development from educational psychology, we introduce the Adaptive Solver Hierarchy, a curriculum mechanism that stabilizes training by dynamically aligning environmental difficulty with the Refiner’s evolving competence. ReQueR yields consistent absolute gains of 1.3%–7.2% across diverse architectures and benchmarks, outperforming strong baselines by 2.1% on average. Crucially, it provides a promising paradigm for one-to-many inference-time reasoning elicitation, enabling a single Refiner trained on a small set of models to effectively unlock reasoning in diverse unseen Solvers. Code is available at https://github.com/newera-xiao/ReQueR.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Ning Wang Jiangnan University, Zhanyang Liu, Taotao Zhou, Xinrui Zhang, Zongru Shao Silicon Austria Labs, Haojie Zhou Jiangnan University
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse and potentially conflicting human values necessitates navigating complex multi-objective landscapes. However, existing prompt-conditioned approaches face a critical training-inference discrepancy: they rely on ground-truth scores during training while requiring manual user-specification at inference. We introduce prediction of implicit preferences to bridge this gap while reducing user burden. To this end, we propose Self-Guided Alignment (SGA), a framework that transforms passive reward dependency into an intrinsic adaptive sensing capability. It employs a dual-head architecture to unify preference internalization with conditional generation, enabling the model to learn a latent mapping between raw prompts and preference profiles. Through adaptive preference sensing, the model autonomously predicts the latent preference score to self-guide the generation, thereby eliminating the need for manual specification at inference. Extensive experiments across diverse model scales demonstrate that SGA often outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior multi-objective trade-offs and improved preference alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/python-yyds/SGA.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue University of Sydney, Lei Bai Shanghai AI Laboratory 等 10 位作者
The rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offers new opportunities for complex scientific challenges, yet their application in earth science—especially at the graduate level—remains underexplored due to a lack of benchmarks reflecting the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or simple figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the nuanced reasoning required for real-world applications. To address this, we introduce MSEarth, a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from high-quality, open-access publications. Covering the five major spheres of Earth science—atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere—MSEarth features over 289K figures with refined captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from the original papers. The benchmark supports tasks such as scientific figure captioning, multiple choice questions, and open-ended reasoning, providing a scalable, high-fidelity resource for developing and evaluating MLLMs in scientific reasoning.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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
Pengqi Li, Lizhong Ding Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhehao Zhou, Chunhui Zhang, Jiarun Fu, Hao Li Beijing Institute of Technology, Ye Yuan Beijing Institute of Technology, Guoren Wang Beijing Institute of Technology
Hallucinations arise when large language models (LLMs) guess rather than acknowledge their underlying uncertainty. Existing static strategies for mitigating hallucinations have been only partially successful, largely because they do not explicitly model the information gain from interacting with the external environment. Researchers need a general method to proactively steer users toward informative clarifications, thereby unlocking the model’s effective capacity under underspecified inputs. We model the uncertainty of LLMs in interactive settings and uncover the mechanism of active calibration between model concepts and human evaluations, improving reliability. We show that calibration error in LLMs density estimation admits a non-vanishing lower bound under non-interactive learning, while interaction empirically reduces it. We further characterize that calibration error identifies informative queries and that calibration can be accelerated by shifting query distributions from imbalanced to balanced regimes. Guided by these insights, we propose a calibration-driven Interactive Learning Strategy (ILS) that selects clarification queries by optimizing calibration error, providing both theoretical guarantees and empirical gains for reliability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhouyeah215/Demystifying_Uncertainty.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiang Hu, Zhanchao Zhou, Ruiqi Liang, Zehuan Li, Wei Wu Ant Research, Jianguo Li
This work explores efficient ultra-long context modeling. We posit that an effective solution requires three fundamental properties: sparsity, random-access flexibility, and length generalization. To achieve this, we leverage Hierarchical Sparse Attention (HSA), a novel attention mechanism that satisfies all three properties. We integrate HSA into the Transformer architecture to develop HSA-UltraLong, an 8B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model trained on over 8 trillion tokens. We rigorously evaluate the model across tasks with both in-domain and out-of-domain context lengths to validate its capabilities. Our model demonstrates comparable performance to full-attention baselines on in-domain sequence lengths. Crucially, it achieves over 90% accuracy on most in-context retrieval tasks with contexts up to 512 times the pre-training context length. This work reports our findings and remaining issues throughout the experiments, offering insights for future research in ultra-long context modeling.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zifeng Cheng Nanjing University, Lingyun Qian, Zhiwei Jiang Nanjing University, Cong Wang Nanjing University, Yafeng Yin Nanjing University, Fei Shen National University of Singapore and Tencent, Ao Zhou, Qing Gu Nanjing University
Extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a promising paradigm, as it requires neither additional data nor fine-tuning. Existing methods incorporate conditions into prompts to guide LLMs to focus on specific aspects and elicit conditional text embeddings. However, relying solely on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional text embeddings, as they remain entangled with general text embeddings, ultimately degrading their quality. To this end, we propose an inference-time, plug-and-play Self-Contrastive Steering (SCS) method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeddings, making them more focused on the target condition. Specifically, we modify the attention mask and positional encodings to mask the condition, thereby obtaining unconditional text embeddings and intervening in the multi-head self-attention computation process. Notably, our method is highly efficient, requiring only a single additional multi-head self-attention computation at inference time. Extensive experiments on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets demonstrate that our method can seamlessly improve the performance of existing prompt-based methods across different LLMs in a training-free and plug-and-play manner.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Lingkun Long Sensetime, Yushi Huang Tencent Hunyuan, Shihao Bai, Ruihao Gong Beihang University, Jun Zhang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Ao Zhou, Jianlei Yang Beihang University
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference efficiency. Although sparse attention is promising, existing methods remain ineffective. This stems from the need to estimate attention importance for tokens yet to be decoded, while the unmasked token positions are unknown during diffusion. In this paper, we present Focus-dLLM, a novel training-free attention sparsification framework tailored for accurate and efficient long-context dLLM inference. Based on the finding that token confidence strongly correlates across adjacent steps, we first design a past confidence-guided indicator to predict unmasked regions. Built upon this, we propose a sink-aware pruning strategy to accurately estimate and remove redundant attention computation, while preserving highly influential attention sinks. To further reduce overhead, this strategy reuses identified sink locations across layers, leveraging the observed cross-layer consistency. Experimental results show that our method offers more than 29\times lossless speedup under 32K context length.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhiyu Xu Peking University, Lean Wang DeepSeek and Peking University, Yuanxin Liu Peking University, Lei Li, Hao Zhou Tencent, Fandong Meng WeChat AI, Tencent Inc., Jie Zhou, Xu Sun Peking University
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general multi-modal understanding; yet they struggle to efficiently acquire continually evolving domain-specific skills. Conventional approaches to enhancing VLM capabilities, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), require extensive dataset curation and substantial computational resources. Model merging has emerged as an efficient alternative that enables the transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. Unlike conventional merging of homogeneous LLMs, which mainly aggregates existing capabilities, cross-modal skill injection aims to induce emergent cross-modal capabilities by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. However, existing research lacks a systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. In this study, we investigate cross-modal skill injection across three main aspects: scenarios, methods, and hyperparameters. For scenarios, we find that cross-modal skill injection generally performs well in instruction-following and cross-lingual settings, yet struggles with mathematical reasoning. For methods, we find that classic approaches such as TA and DARE consistently achieve superior performance over alternative merging methods. We also provide a systematic and quantitative analysis of the hyperparameter tuning that these classic methods critically depend on.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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
Yicheng Liu, Shumin Shi Beijing Institute of Technology, Youchao Zhou, Xingchen Zhang Beijing Institute of Technology
Large language models (LLMs) perform well on Standard Chinese but struggle with low-resource Chinese dialects due to substantial phonological divergence. We investigate whether incorporating Middle Chinese, the common historical ancestor of most of the modern Chinese dialects, can improve dialectal pronunciation modeling in a linguistically interpretable manner. We focus on two specific task variants: (1) conditional sound change rule induction (a variant of Sound Law Induction, SLI), where models infer executable phonological transformation rules from Middle Chinese to modern dialects, and (2) sentence-level dialectal pronunciation transcription (a variant of Grapheme-to-Phoneme, G2P), requiring dialect-specific International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) generation. We construct a multi-source dataset covering Middle Chinese and 12 modern Chinese dialects, including character-level correspondences, rule exemplars, and sentence-level IPA transcription. We adopt a parameter-efficient training framework combining LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for the first task. Across both tasks and a wide range of dialects and evaluation metrics, our approach achieves overall improvements over strong baselines, including DeepSeek-V3.2 and ChatGPT-5.2, while revealing variation across dialects. These results demonstrate the value of leveraging historical linguistic knowledge for modeling low-resource Chinese dialects.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhenhao Zhou, Zhuochen Huang, Yike He, Chong Wang Nanyang Technological University, Jiajun Wang Fudan University, Yijian Wu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Yiling Lou University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Linux kernel is a critical system, serving as the foundation for numerous systems. Bugs in the Linux kernel can cause serious consequences, affecting billions of users. Fault localization (FL), which aims at identifying the buggy code elements in software, plays an essential role in software quality assurance. While recent LLM agents have achieved promising accuracy in FL on recent benchmarks like SWE-bench, it remains unclear how well these methods perform in the Linux kernel, where FL is much more challenging due to the large-scale code base, limited observability, and diverse impact factors. In this paper, we introduce LinuxFLBench, a FL benchmark constructed from real-world Linux kernel bugs. We conduct an empirical study to assess the performance of state-of-the-art LLM agents on the Linux kernel. Our initial results reveal that existing agents struggle with this task, achieving a best top-1 accuracy of only 41.6% at file level. To address this challenge, we propose LinuxFL+, an enhancement framework designed to improve FL effectiveness of LLM agents for the Linux kernel. LinuxFL+ substantially improves the FL accuracy of all studied agents (e.g., 7.2% - 11.2% accuracy increase) with minimal costs.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
The efficiency of long-video inference remains a critical bottleneck, mainly due to the dense computation in the prefill stage of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Existing methods either compress visual embeddings or apply sparse attention on a single GPU, yielding limited acceleration or degraded performance and restricting LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos. To overcome these issues, we propose APB-V, a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. By distributing approximate attention, APB-V reduces computation and increases parallelism, enabling efficient processing of more visual embeddings without compression and thereby improving task performance. System-level optimizations, such as load balancing and fused forward passes, further unleash the potential of APB-V, delivering speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB, without notable performance loss.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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
Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang Beijing Institute of Technology, Jinxing Zhou Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan Alibaba Group, Ziqin Zhou Canva 等 15 位作者
Recent advances in text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation have enabled models to synthesize audio-visual videos with multi-participant dialogues. However, existing evaluation benchmarks remain largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. As a result, structural failures in generated multi-talker dialogue videos, such as identity drift, unnatural turn transitions, and audio-visual misalignment, cannot be effectively diagnosed. To address this issue, we introduce MTAVG-Bench, a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. MTAVG-Bench is built via a semi-automatic pipeline, where 1.8k videos are generated using mainstream T2AV models with carefully designed prompts, yielding 2.4k manually annotated QA pairs for fine-grained failure diagnosis. The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. Built on a hierarchical failure taxonomy and a targeted QA protocol, MTAVG-Bench is primarily designed to evaluate whether proprietary and open-source omni-models can reliably identify failure modes in multi-speaker T2AV outputs. We benchmark 12 proprietary and open-source omni-models on MTAVG-Bench, with Gemini 3 Pro achieving the strongest overall performance, while leading open-source models remain competitive in signal fidelity and consistency. Overall, MTAVG-Bench enables fine-grained failure analysis for rigorous model comparison and targeted video generation refinement.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jiaxin Bai Hong Kong Baptist University, Wei Fan Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yauwai Yim 等 20 位作者
We present AutoSchemaKG, a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. Our system leverages large language models to simultaneously extract knowledge triples and induce comprehensive schemas directly from text, modeling both entities and events while employing conceptualization to organize instances into semantic categories. Processing over 50 million documents, we construct ATLAS (Automated Triple Linking And Schema induction), a family of knowledge graphs with 900+ million nodes and 5.9 billion edges. This approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. Notably, our schema induction achieves 92% semantic alignment with human-crafted schemas with zero manual intervention, demonstrating that billion-scale knowledge graphs with dynamically induced schemas can effectively complement parametric knowledge in large language models.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Deep research is an inherently challenging task that demands both breadth and depth of thinking. It involves navigating diverse knowledge spaces and reasoning over complex, multi-step dependencies, which presents substantial challenges for agentic systems. To address this, we propose FlowSearch, a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning. FlowSearch is capable of strategically planning and expanding the knowledge flow to enable parallel exploration and hierarchical task decomposition, while also adjusting the knowledge flow in real time based on feedback from intermediate reasoning outcomes and insights. FlowSearch achieves competitive performance on both general and scientific benchmarks, including GAIA, HLE, GPQA and TRQA, demonstrating its effectiveness in multi-disciplinary research scenarios and its potential to advance scientific discovery. The code will be available.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"
Zhongyi Zhou, Kohei Uehara, Haoyu Zhang, Jingtao Zhou, Lin Gu, Ruofei Du, Zheng Xu, Tatsuya Harada
AI 速览：ToolGrad 提出“先答案后问题”的智能体框架，通过文本“梯度”迭代构造有效工具调用链，再反向合成用户查询，从而低成本生成高质量工具使用数据集。
Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.