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.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Binchi Zhang University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America, Zaiyi Zheng, Jundong Li University of Virginia, Haifeng Chen NEC-Labs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by encoding extensive knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as human knowledge keeps evolving. In this paper, we investigate the problem of LLM knowledge updates, which requires simultaneously unlearning unwanted information and learning new knowledge. Existing approaches that tackle unlearning and learning separately encounter task conflicts and knowledge management issues when applied to comprehensive knowledge updates.In this paper, we validate our findings with theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, and propose LOKA, a conflict-aware framework for Large language mOdel Knowledge updAtes. During training, LOKA introduces an adaptive knowledge memory approach in which updated knowledge is allocated across multiple memory units. During inference, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory unit from the knowledge memory and integrates it with the original LLM to apply updated knowledge, while a learning-based router controls the activation of the knowledge memory to improve knowledge utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LOKA in achieving accurate, flexible, and conflict-aware knowledge updates.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Binchi Zhang University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Xujiang Zhao NEC Labs America, Jundong Li University of Virginia, Haifeng Chen NEC-Labs, Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment. CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results. To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.
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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.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhen Yang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Mingyang Zhang Alibaba Group, Feng Chen University of Adelaide, Ganggui Ding, Liang Hou Kuaishou Technology, Xin Tao Kuaishou, Ying-Cong Chen The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet underexplored phenomenon: reasoning uncertainty is highly localized—only a small subset of high-entropy tokens dominantly affects output correctness. Motivated by this, we propose Minimal Test-Time Intervention (MTI), a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. MTI includes: (i) Selective CFG intervention, applying classifier-free guidance only at uncertain positions; and (ii) Lightweight negative-prompt guidance, reusing the main model’s KV cache to approximate unconditional decoding efficiently. MTI yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks—e.g., +9.28% average improvement on six benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1-7B and +11.25% on AIME2024 using Ling-mini-2.0—while remaining highly efficient.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks by adopting the “think-then-answer” paradigm, which enhances both accuracy and interpretability. However, current LRMs exhibit two critical limitations when processing non-English languages: (1) They often struggle to maintain input-output language consistency; (2) They generally perform poorly with wrong reasoning paths and lower answer accuracy compared to English. These limitations significantly compromise the interpretability of reasoning processes and degrade the user experience for non-English speakers, hindering the global deployment of LRMs. To address these limitations, we propose M-Thinker, which is trained by the GRPO algorithm that involves a Language Consistency (LC) reward and a novel Cross-lingual Thinking Alignment (CTA) reward. Specifically, the LC reward defines a strict constraint on the language consistency between the input, thought, and answer. Besides, the CTA reward compares the model’s non-English reasoning paths with its English reasoning path to transfer its own reasoning capability from English to non-English languages. Through an iterative RL procedure, our M-Thinker-1.5B/4B/7B models not only achieve nearly 100% language consistency and superior performance on two multilingual benchmarks (MMATH and PolyMath), but also exhibit excellent generalization on out-of-domain languages.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Autonomous research agents produce competitive solutions and professional-looking manuscripts, yet their outputs contain verifiability failures undetectable by surface-level evaluation: fabricated citations, unreproducible scores, and method descriptions that diverge from the implementation. We address this through three contributions. First, Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), a verifiability framework requiring every claim to be traceable to its evidence source. Second, ScientistOne, an end-to-end autonomous research system that maintains evidence chains by construction throughout literature review, solution discovery, and paper writing. Third, CoE Audit, a post-hoc audit whose four integrity checks -- score verification, specification violation, reference verification, and method-code alignment -- apply uniformly to all systems. Across 75 papers spanning five systems and five frontier research tasks, every baseline exhibits at least one systematic failure mode: hallucinated reference rates reach 21%, score verification passes in as few as 42% of papers, and method-code alignment ranges from 20% to 80%. ScientistOne achieves zero hallucinated references (0/337), perfect score verification (12/12), and the highest method-code alignment (14/15), while matching or exceeding human expert performance on all five tasks. ScientistOne further generalizes to six additional tasks spanning medical imaging, fine-grained recognition, 3D perception, and language modeling, achieving state-of-the-art on Parameter Golf and gold medals on MLE-Bench tasks where baselines fail entirely.
Jiaqi Liu, Shi Qiu, Mairui Li, Bingzhou Li, Haonian Ji, Siwei Han, Xinyu Ye, Peng Xia 等 36 位作者
Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.