Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Yongding Tao Peking University, Huanyu Liu Peking University, Kechi Zhang Peking University, Lili Mou University of Alberta, Rongyu Cao, Yingwei MA Alibaba Group 等 14 位作者
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it struggles to break through the inherent capability boundaries of the base LLM, due to its essentially on-policy strategy coupled with LLM’s immense action space and sparse reward. Critically, RLVR can lead to the capability boundary collapse, narrowing the LLM’s problem-solving scope. To address this problem, we propose R-PLUS, a novel hybrid-policy optimization approach for LLMs that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities and surpass the boundaries of base models. R-PLUS integrates two core components, i.e., Multiple Importance Sampling to address distributional mismatch from external data, and Exploration-Based Advantage Function to guide the model towards high-value, unexplored reasoning paths. We provide both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of our approach. Compared with existing RLVR methods, R-PLUS achieves 1) state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks; 2) superior performance on six out-of-distribution reasoning tasks; 3) consistent and significant gains across diverse model families, with average relative improvements up to 69.2%. Moreover, the analysis of Pass@k curves indicates that R-PLUS effectively resolves the capability boundary collapse problem.
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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
Shuyu Zhang, Yujie Liu Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Xinru Wang University of Sydney, Cheng Zhang Tianjin University of Finance & Economics, Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Bin Li Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Traditional task-oriented dialog systems are unable to evolve from ongoing interactions or adapt to new domains after deployment, that is a critical limitation in real-world dynamic environments. Continual learning approaches depend on episodic retraining with human-curated data, failing to achieve autonomy lifelong improvement. While evolutionary computation and LLM driven self-improvement offer promising mechanisms for dialog optimization, they lack a unified framework for holistic, iterative strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose DarwinTOD, a lifelong self-evolving dialog framework that systematically integrates these two paradigms, enabling continuous strategy optimization from a zero-shot base without task-specific fine-tuning. DarwinTOD maintains an Evolvable Strategy Bank and operates through a dual-loop process: online multi-agent dialog execution with peer critique, and offline structured evolutionary operations that refine the strategy bank using accumulated feedback. This closed-loop design enables autonomous continuous improvement without human intervention. Extensive experiments show that DarwinTOD surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and exhibits continuous performance gains throughout evolution. Our work provides a novel framework for building dialog systems with lifelong self-evolution capabilities.
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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
Shuyu Zhang, Yifan Wei, Jialuo Yuan Independent, Xinru Wang University of Sydney, Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yujie Liu Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Bin Li Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT, a novel dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space \mathcal{C} that captures dialog progression, user uncertainty, and slot dependency. DyBBT proposes a bandit-inspired meta-controller that dynamically switches between a fast intuitive inference (System 1) and a slow deliberative reasoner (System 2) based on real-time cognitive states and visitation counts. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-domain benchmarks show that DyBBT achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization, with human evaluations confirming that its decisions are well-aligned with expert judgment.
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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
Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Tencent, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai Tencent, Xi Chen 等 13 位作者
Model Editing, also known as knowledge editing, is receiving increasing attention in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing model editing approaches predominantly focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. This paper exploratively applies six representative model editing methods (FT, IKE, MEND, SERAC, MEMIT and AlphaEdit) to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) and introduces the first benchmark specifically designed for Vid-LLMs editing—VMEB (Vid-LLMs Model Editing Benchmark)—systematically extending model editing research from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. We position this work as a forward-looking benchmark and a foundational diagnostic study: in the video paradigm, our evaluation dimensions encompass traditional metrics including Reliability, Locality, and Generality, while also introducing a video-specific metric: Robustness. Based on experimental results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of existing model editing approaches, and identify new challenges and research directions for the future development of the model editing field within the context of multimodal and video paradigms. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Sakabamrisa/VMEB.
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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
Kai Zou, Ziqi Huang, Yuhao Dong, Shulin Tian Nanyang Technological University, Dian Zheng The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hongbo Liu, Jingwen He, Bin Liu University of Science and Technology of China 等 10 位作者
Unified multimodal models aim to jointly enable visual understanding and generation, yet current benchmarks rarely examine their true integration. Existing evaluations either treat the two abilities in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. To address this gap, we present Uni-MMMU, a comprehensive and discipline-aware benchmark that systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains, including science, coding, mathematics, and puzzles. Each task is bidirectionally coupled, demanding models to (i) leverage conceptual understanding to guide precise visual synthesis, or (ii) utilize generation as a cognitive scaffold for analytical reasoning. Uni-MMMU incorporates verifiable intermediate reasoning steps, unique ground truths, and a reproducible scoring protocol for both textual and visual outputs. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art unified, generation-only, and understanding-only models, we reveal substantial performance disparities and cross-modal dependencies, offering new insights into when and how these abilities reinforce one another, and establishing a reliable foundation for advancing unified models.
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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
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) is largely driven by scaling training compute through either pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training with reinforcement learning (RL). The former contributes to learning broad knowledge and skills from general data, while struggling with data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. The latter incentivizes reasoning capabilities with strong generalization, but is constrained by limited data availability due to its reliance on human annotation. To alleviate these issues, we propose Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training data (RLPT), which combines the advantages of learning from general data and RL. In particular, RLPT derives reward signals directly from general text data through a next-segment reasoning objective, rewarding the policy for correctly predicting next text segments conditioned on the prefix text. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of . For example, RLPT yields substantial improvements in continual pre-training (+4.6\%) and provides a strong foundation for post-training (+3.4\%) on Qwen3-8B-Base.
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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
Chonghua Liao, Ke Wang Alibaba Group, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Ruoran Li, Fei Huang Alibaba Group US, Yongbin Li Alibaba Group
Role-playing agents (RPAs) require balancing multiple objectives, such as instruction following, persona consistency, and stylistic fidelity, which are not always perfectly aligned across different dimensions. While prior work has primarily relied on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning with scalarized rewards, these approaches do not explicitly address the coordination of multiple reward dimensions during optimization. We present MOA (Multi-Objective Alignment), a reinforcement-learning framework that enables multi-dimensional, fine-grained rubric optimization for general RPAs. MOA introduces a novel multi-objective optimization strategy that trains simultaneously on multiple fine-grained rubrics to boost optimization performance. Besides, to address the issues of model output diversity and quality, we have also employed thought-augmented rollout with off-policy guidance. Experiments on PersonaGym and RoleMRC show that MOA consistently improves multi-dimensional role-playing performance over supervised and standard RL baselines. Under identical evaluation protocols, an 8B model trained with MOA reaches performance competitive with strong closed-source models across multiple evaluation dimensions. These results suggest that MOA provides a practical framework for training more capable general-purpose role-playing 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
Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Xiong Liu Alibaba Group, Jing Ye Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ziqiang Liu 等 13 位作者
Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.
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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
Zedian Shao, Hongbin Liu Google, Yuepeng Hu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing Internet-scale image data, offering significant benefits but also raising critical safety and societal concerns. In particular, these models may be misused to extract sensitive information from personal images, such as identifying individuals or revealing locations. In this work, we propose ImageProtector, a method designed to protect images from unauthorized analysis by MLLMs. Before an image is shared online, ImageProtector embeds a carefully crafted, nearly imperceptible perturbation that acts as a visual prompt injection attack on MLLMs. Consequently, when a malicious actor downloads and queries a protected image, the MLLM is consistently misled into generating a refusal response such as “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that request.” We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of ImageProtector across six MLLMs and four datasets. Additionally, we evaluate three potential countermeasures, Gaussian noise, DiffPure, and adversarial training, and show that while they partially mitigate the impact of ImageProtector, they simultaneously degrade model accuracy and/or efficiency.
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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
Jie Huang, Xin Liao, Junjie Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mingyang Li Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wenshuo Wang ISCAS, Ziyou Jiang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shoubin Li, Qing Wang
With the rise of short-video platforms, hate speech has evolved from static text and memes into more covert and aggressive hateful video formats, profoundly impacting social dynamics and public sentiment. Existing detection methods typically rely on multimodal feature fusion, which blurs the distinct boundaries of modality-specific information. This leads to the feature dilution problem, where dominant benign modalities often overwhelm sparse, localized hateful cues. To address this, we propose SAGE (Synergistic Adaptive Gating of Experts), a novel framework that shifts the paradigm from blind feature mixing to decision-level arbitration. Mimicking human cognitive processes, SAGE instantiates disentangled experts to rigorously preserve modality-specific semantics, facilitates global expert deliberation for context-aware refinement, and convenes an instance-level tribunal to dynamically arbitrate the final verdict based on evidentiary salience. Extensive experiments on HateMM and MultiHateClip benchmarks demonstrate that SAGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy gains of 6.37% to 21.23% and macro-F1 score gains of 6.77% to 28.01%.
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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
Yun He Meta, Wenzhe Li Princeton University, Hejia Zhang Facebook, Songlin Li Facebook and Stanford University, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla Facebook, Yuanhao Xiong University of California, Los Angeles, Nanshu Wang Facebook 等 25 位作者
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)—especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions—remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation and effective training for such capabilities are hindered by the lack of high-quality, human-annotated benchmarks and reliable, interpretable reward signals. In this work, we introduce AdvancedIF, a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. We also open-source the evaluation script of AdvancedIF. We further propose RIFL (Rubric-based Instruction-Following Learning), a novel post-training pipeline that leverages rubric generation, a finetuned rubric verifier, and reward shaping to enable effective reinforcement learning for instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFL substantially improves the instruction-following abilities of LLMs, achieving a 6.7% absolute gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. Our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in RIFL. This work establishes rubrics as a powerful tool for both training and evaluating advanced IF in LLMs, paving the way for more capable and reliable AI systems.
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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