Guy Mor-Lan, Omer Goldman University of Cambridge, Matan Eyal Google, Adi Mayrav Gilady Research, Google, Sivan Eiger, Idan Szpektor Google, Avinatan Hassidim Bar-Ilan University and Google, Yossi Matias Google and Tel Aviv University 等 9 位作者
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have minimized the fluency gap between languages. This advancement, however, exposes models to the risk of biased behavior, as knowledge and norms may propagate across languages. In this work we aim to quantify models’ inter- and intra-lingual biases, via their ability to answer locale-ambiguous questions. To this end, we present LocQA, a test set containing 2,156 questions in 12 languages, referring to various locale-dependent facts such as laws, dates, and measurements. The questions do not contain indications of the locales they relate to, other than the querying language itself. LLMs’ responses to LocQA locale-ambiguous questions thus reveal models’ implicit priors. We used LocQA to evaluate 32 models, and detected two types of structural biases. Inter-lingually, we show a global bias towards answers relevant to the US-locale, even when models are asked in languages other than English. Moreover, we discovered that this global bias is exacerbated in models that underwent instruction tuning, compared to their base counterparts. Intra-lingually, we show that when multiple locales are relevant for the same language, models act as demographic probability engines, prioritizing locales with larger populations. Taken together, insights from LocQA may help in shaping LLMs’ desired local behavior, and in quantifying the impact of various training phases on different kinds of biases.
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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
Kushal Tatariya, Artur Kulmizev, Wessel Poelman KU Leuven, Esther Ploeger Utrecht University, Marcel Bollmann Linköping University, Johannes Bjerva Aalborg University, Jiaming Luo Google, Heather Lent Aalborg University, Aalborg University 等 9 位作者
Wikipedia’s perceived high quality and broad language coverage have established it as a fundamental resource in NLP. However, in recent years, such assumptions of high quality have become the subject of scrutiny in low-resource and multilingual contexts. In this study, we subject the entirety of non-English Wikipedia to a data filtering procedure typically reserved for noisy web-text — a process which removes a large percentage of the collection’s data. In analysing the removed data, we reveal numerous systematic quality issues, such as script and language contamination, repeated template and placeholder articles, and a high concentration of bot-generated content. We consolidate these findings into a 4-level quality ranking of Wikipedia, which shows strong correspondence with alternative quality measures and heuristics. Lastly, we evaluate the downstream impact of quality filtering in three practical language modelling scenarios, showing that models trained on filtered data largely match or outperform those trained on raw Wikipedia, with the largest gains observed for lower-quality language editions. Ultimately, our experiments serve as a first step in establishing quality-aware best practices for Wikipedia utilization in NLP, laying groundwork that can inform future dataset creation and curation efforts.
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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
Zifan Jiang, Youngjoon Jang, Liliane Momeni Google, Gül Varol, Sarah Ebling University of Zurich, Andrew Zisserman Google DeepMind and University of Oxford
The goal of this work is to develop a universal approach for aligning subtitles (i.e., spoken language text with corresponding timestamps) to continuous sign language videos. Prior approaches typically rely on end-to-end training tied to a specific language or dataset, which limits their generality. In contrast, our method Segment, Embed, and Align (SEA) provides a single framework that works across multiple languages and domains. SEA leverages two pretrained models: the first to segment a video sequence into individual signs and the second to embed each sign video clip into a shared latent space with text. Alignment is subsequently performed with a lightweight dynamic programming procedure that runs efficiently on CPU within a minute, even for hour-long episodes. SEA is flexible and can adapt to a wide range of scenarios, utilizing resources from small lexicons to large continuous corpora. Experiments on four sign language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art alignment performance, highlighting the potential of SEA to generate high-quality parallel data for advancing sign language processing.
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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
Gouki Minegishi, Hiroki Furuta Google DeepMind, Takeshi Kojima The University of Tokyo, Yusuke Iwasawa The University of Tokyo, The University of Tokyo, Yutaka Matsuo The University of Tokyo
Emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on narrow, non-harmful tasks induces harmful behaviors, poses a key challenge for AI safety in LLMs. Despite growing empirical evidence, its underlying mechanism remains unclear. To uncover the reason behind this phenomenon, we propose a mechanistic account based on the geometry of feature superposition. Because features are encoded in overlapping, fine-tuning that amplifies a target feature also unintentionally strengthens nearby harmful features in accordance with their similarity. We give a simple gradient-level derivation of this mechanism and empirically test it across multiple LLMs (Gemma-2 2B/9B/27B, LLaMA-3.1 8B, gpt-oss 20B). Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we identify features tied to misalignment-inducing data and to harmful behaviors, and show that they are geometrically closer to each other than features derived from non-inducing data. This trend generalizes across domains (e.g., health, career, legal advice). Finally, we show that a geometry-aware approach—filtering training samples nearest to toxic features—reduces misalignment by 34.5%, substantially outperforming random removal and achieving stronger mitigation than LLM-as-a-judge–based filtering. Our study explains emergent misalignment through feature superposition, providing a basis for understanding and mitigating this phenomenon.
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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
Miaomiao Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hao Chen Google DeepMind, Yang Wang Tencent Inc., Tingyuan Zhu Institute of Science Tokyo, Weijia Zhang, Kaijie Zhu, Kam-Fai Wong The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jindong Wang William & Mary
Generating synthetic datasets via large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to improve LLM performance.However, LLMs inherently reflect biases in their training data, leading to a critical challenge: when models are trained on synthetic data, they may propagate and amplify the inherent biases that can significantly impact fairness and robustness on downstream tasks—a phenomenon we term bias inheritance. This work presents the first systematic investigation in understanding, analyzing, and mitigating bias inheritance. We fine-tune LLMs with a combined dataset of real and LLM-augmented data with varied bias ratio as the proportion of augmented data. Through systematic experiments across 10 classification and generation tasks, we analyze how 6 different types of biases manifest. Our results indicate that bias inheritance harms downstream task performance in bias directly-related classification and generation tasks. Then, our analysis identifies three key misalignment factors: misalignment of values, group data, and data distributions. Based on these insights, we propose three mitigation strategies: token-based, mask-based, and loss-based approaches, which can work differently on various tasks and bias, indicating the substantial challenges to mitigate bias inheritance. We hope this work can provide insights to the research of LLM data augmentation.
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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
Yupeng Hou University of California, San Diego, Jiacheng Li Facebook, Xiangjun Fu University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Zhankui He Google DeepMind, An Yan SalesForce, Xiusi Chen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Julian McAuley University of California, San Diego, University of California, San Diego
Feature engineering has long been central to recommender systems, yet effectively leveraging textual item features remains challenging. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as semantic encoders for recommendation, but their roles and behaviors in this setting are still not well understood. Prior studies often rely on general-purpose embedding benchmarks (e.g., MTEB) when selecting LLMs, overlooking the unique characteristics of recommendation tasks. To address this gap, we introduce BLaIR, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs as semantic encoders in recommendation scenarios. We contribute (1) a new large-scale Amazon Reviews 2023 dataset with over 570 million reviews and 48 million items, (2) a unified benchmark covering sequential recommendation, collaborative filtering, and product search, and (3) a new complex-query product search task featuring both semi-synthetic and real-world evaluation datasets. Experiments with 11 leading LLMs show that their rankings on BLaIR show little correlation with MTEB, highlighting the unique challenges of semantic encoding in recommendation.
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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
Guangya Wan, Mingyang Ling, Xiaoqi Ren, Rujun Han Google, Sheng Li Oracle and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Zizhao Zhang Google
Long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple tool interactions remain challenging for LLM agents: small errors compound across steps, and even state-of-the-art models often hallucinate or lose coherence. We identify context management as the central bottleneck—extended histories cause agents to overlook critical evidence or become distracted by irrelevant information, thus failing to replan or reflect from previous mistakes. To address this, we propose COMPASS (Context-Organized Multi-Agent Planning and Strategy System), a lightweight hierarchical framework that separates tactical execution, strategic oversight, and context organization into three specialized components: (1) a Main Agent that performs reasoning and tool use, (2) a Meta-Thinker that monitors progress and issues strategic interventions, and (3) a Context Manager that maintains concise, relevant progress briefs for different reasoning stages. Across three challenging benchmarks—GAIA, BrowseComp, and Humanity’s Last Exam—COMPASS improves accuracy by up to 20% relative to both single- and multi-agent baselines. We further introduce a test-time scaling extension that elevates performance to match established DeepResearch agents, and a post-training pipeline that delegates context management to smaller models for enhanced efficiency.
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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
Wenjie Jacky Mo, Qin Liu University of California, Davis, Xiaofei Wen University of California, Davis, Dongwon Jung, Hadi Askari, Wenxuan Zhou Google Deepmind, Zhe Zhao University of California, Davis, Muhao Chen University of California, Davis
Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation (i.e., Code LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in AI-assisted software development and testing. However, recent studies have shown that these models are prone to generating vulnerable or even malicious code under adversarial settings. Existing red-teaming approaches rely on extensive human effort, limiting their scalability and practicality, and generally overlook the interactive nature of real-world AI-assisted programming, which often unfolds over multiple turns. To bridge these gaps, we present RedCoder, a red-teaming agent that engages victim models in multi-turn conversation to elicit vulnerable code. The pipeline to construct RedCoder begins with a multi-agent gaming process that simulates adversarial interactions, yielding a set of prototype conversations and an arsenal of reusable attack strategies. We then fine-tune an LLM on these prototype conversations to serve as the backbone of RedCoder. Once deployed, RedCoder autonomously engages Code LLMs in multi-turn conversations, dynamically retrieving relevant strategies from the arsenal to steer the dialogue toward vulnerability-inducing outputs. Experiments across multiple Code LLMs show that our approach outperforms prior single-turn and multi-turn red-team methods in inducing vulnerabilities in code generation, offering a scalable and effective tool for evaluating the security boundaries of modern code-generation systems.
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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
Yu Fu University of California, Riverside, Chen Luo Amazon, Josef Valvoda Google, Xin Zhang, Xuejing Lei Amazon, Xiao Pan, Hui Liu Amazon, Yue Dong University of California, Riverside
Key-Value (KV) cache compression techniques have improved the efficiency of long-context summarization in Large Language Models (LLMs), but their impact on model hallucination remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of how KV cache compression affects hallucination in long-context summarization, demonstrating that aggressive compression can increase hallucination scores by up to 3.36× compared to the baseline. To mitigate this issue, we propose HalluKV, a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context, thereby anchoring their attention on the preserved source information. Our approach maintains computational efficiency while significantly reducing hallucination across multiple models and datasets, achieving up to 5.48 average point reductions on Llama-3-8B-Instruct, enabling more trustworthy long-context summarization.
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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
Parker Riley Google, Daniel Deutsch Google, Mara Finkelstein Google, Colten DiIanni Google, Juraj Juraska Google, Markus Freitag Google
Human evaluation of machine translation is in an arms race with translation model quality: as our models get better, our evaluation methods need to be improved to ensure that quality gains are not lost in evaluation noise. To improve annotation quality, we experiment with a two-stage version of the current state-of-the-art translation evaluation paradigm (MQM), which we call MQM re-annotation. In this setup, an annotator reviews and edits a set of prior MQM annotations that may have come from themselves, another human annotator, or an automatic system. We demonstrate that rater behavior in re-annotation aligns with our goals, and that re-annotation results in higher-quality annotations, mostly due to finding errors that were missed during the first pass.
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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
Hyeonjeong Ha Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Qiusi Zhan, Jeonghwan Kim, Dimitrios Bralios, Saikrishna Sanniboina Microsoft, Nanyun Peng Google and University of California, Los Angeles, Kai-Wei Chang University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon, Daniel Kang 等 9 位作者
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a common practice in multimodal large language models (MLLM) to enhance factual grounding and reduce hallucination. Yet, its reliance on retrieval exposes MLLMs to knowledge poisoning attacks, in which adversaries deliberately inject malicious multimodal content into external knowledge bases to steer models toward generating incorrect or even harmful responses. We present MM-PoisonRAG, a framework to systematically study the vulnerability of multimodal RAG under knowledge poisoning. Specifically, we design two novel attack strategies: Localized Poisoning Attack (LPA), which implants targeted, query-specific multimodal misinformation to manipulate outputs toward attacker-controlled responses, and Globalized Poisoning Attack (GPA), which uses a single, untargeted adversarial injection to broadly corrupt reasoning and collapse generation quality across all queries. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks, multimodal RAG components, and attacker access levels reveal severe vulnerabilities: LPA achieves up to 56% attack success rate even under restricted access, and transfers effectively across four different retrievers without re-optimizing the adversaries. GPA completely disrupts model generation to 0% accuracy with just one poisoned content. Moreover, both LPA and GPA bypass existing defenses, underscoring the fragility of multimodal RAG and establishing MM-PoisonRAG as a foundation for future research on securing RAG frameworks against multimodal knowledge poisoning.
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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
Yi Su, Dian Yu Tencent AI Lab, Linfeng Song Google, Juntao Li, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Zhaopeng Tu Tencent, Min Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Harbin Institute of Technology, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on tasks with structured solutions like math and coding, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a fundamental bottleneck. We find their applicability is surprisingly narrow even in structured domains, a limitation that is compounded at scale: rule-based systems can paradoxically degrade in performance as multi-domain, free-form training data increases. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new RLVR framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. Our key insight is that powerful LLMs show high agreement with human evaluators when judging answer correctness given a ground-truth reference, allowing us to automate reward generation without costly human annotation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. We show that a compact 7B generative reward model can guide a 7B policy model to decisively outperform models up to 10x its size, including the 72B Qwen2.5-Instruct (by a margin of +8.6%). This effectiveness is robust, holding true across diverse training datasets with answers sourced from experts, web users, and other LLMs, and generalizes strongly to seven out-of-distribution benchmarks. Our work provides a scalable and effective framework for extending RLVR beyond the limitations of pattern-based verification to complex, noisy, real-world domains.
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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
Baichuan Huang, Ananth Balashankar Google DeepMind and Google, Amir Aminifar Lund University / Lund Institute of Technology
Fine-tuning the bias terms of large language models (LLMs) has the potential to achieve unprecedented parameter efficiency while maintaining competitive performance, particularly in low-data regimes. However, the link between fine-tuning different bias terms (i.e., \boldsymbol{b}_q, \boldsymbol{b}_k, \boldsymbol{b}_v in the query, key, or value projections) and downstream performance remains largely unclear to date. In this paper, we investigate the link between fine-tuning \boldsymbol{b}_q, \boldsymbol{b}_k, \boldsymbol{b}_v with the performance of the downstream task. Our key finding is that directly fine-tuning \boldsymbol{b}_v generally leads to higher downstream performance in low-data regimes, in comparison to \boldsymbol{b}_q and \boldsymbol{b}_k. We extensively evaluate this unique property across a wide range of LLMs spanning encoder-only and decoder-only architectures up to 6.7B parameters (including bias-free LLMs). Our results provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of directly fine-tuning \boldsymbol{b}_v across various downstream tasks. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/whubaichuan/BEFT.
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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
Mohit Talreja Georgia Institute of Technology, Joshua Diao, Jim James, Radu Casapu Georgia Institute of Technology, Tejas Santanam Georgia Institute of Technology, Ethan Mendes, Alan Ritter Georgia Institute of Technology, Wei Xu Georgia Institute of Technology 等 9 位作者
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are good at recognizing the global location of a photograph – their geolocation prediction accuracy rivals the best human experts. But many VLMs are startlingly bad at explaining which image evidence led to their prediction, even when their location prediction is correct. The reasoning chains produced by VLMs frequently hallucinate scene attributes to support their location prediction (e.g. phantom writing, imagined infrastructure, misidentified flora). In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark for geolocation reasoning chains. We focus on the global location prediction task in the popular GeoGuessr game which draws from Google Street View spanning more than 100 countries. We collaborate with expert GeoGuessr players, including the reigning world champion, to produce 800 “ground truth” reasoning chains for 500 query scenes. These expert reasoning chains address hundreds of different discriminative visual attributes such as license plate shape, architecture, and soil properties to name just a few. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge and VLM-as-a-judge strategies for scoring VLM-generated reasoning chains against our expert reasoning chains and find that Qwen 3 LLM-as-a-judge correlates best with human scoring. Our benchmark reveals that while large, closed-source VLMs such as Gemini and GPT 5 rival human experts at prediction locations, they still lag behind human experts when it comes to producing auditable reasoning chains. Open weights VLMs such as Llama and Qwen catastrophically fail on our benchmark – they perform only slightly better than a baseline in which an LLM hallucinates a reasoning chain with oracle knowledge of the photo location but no visual information at all. We believe the gap between human experts and VLMs on this task points to VLM limitations at extracting fine-grained visual attributes from high resolution images. We open source our benchmark for the community to use.
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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
Saujas Vaduguru Carnegie Mellon University, Yilun Hua Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Yoav Artzi Google DeepMind, arXiv and Cornell University, Daniel Fried Meta AI and Carnegie Mellon University
Humans leverage shared conversational context to become increasingly successful and efficient at communicating over time. One manifestation of this is the formation of ad hoc linguistic conventions, which allow people to coordinate on short, less costly utterances that are understood using shared conversational context. We present a method to train large multimodal models to form conventions, enabling efficient communication. Our approach uses simulated reference games between models, and requires no additional human-produced data. In repeated reference games involving photographs and tangram images, our method enables models to communicate efficiently with people: reducing the message length by up to 41% while increasing success by 15% over the course of the interaction. Human listeners respond faster when interacting with our model that forms conventions. We also show that training based on success or cost alone is insufficient – both are necessary to elicit convention formation.
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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
Jiyeon Kim Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Hyunji Lee Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dylan Zhou Google, Sue Hyun Park KRAFTON Inc., Seunghyun Yoon Adobe Research, Trung Bui Adobe Research, Franck Dernoncourt Adobe Research, Sungmin Cha Meta Superintelligence Labs 等 9 位作者
LLMs operating in dynamic real-world contexts often encounter knowledge that evolves continuously or emerges incrementally. To remain accurate and effective, models must adapt to newly arriving information on the fly. We introduce Online Adaptation to Continual Knowledge Streams(OAKS) to evaluate this capability, establishing a benchmark for online adaptation over streaming, continually updating knowledge. Specifically, the benchmark is structured as a sequence of fine-grained context chunks where facts change dynamically across time intervals. OAKS comprises two datasets: OAKS-BABI and OAKS-Novel, where individual facts evolve multiple times across context chunks. These datasets include dense annotations to measure whether models track changes accurately. Evaluating 14 models with varied inference approaches, we observe significant limitations in current methodologies. Both state-of-the-art models and agentic memory systems fail to adapt robustly on OAKS, demonstrating delays in state-tracking and susceptibility to distraction within streaming environments. We will open-source the code and datasets.
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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
Or David Shafran, Atticus Geiger Goodfire, Mor Geva Tel Aviv University and Google Research
A central goal for mechanistic interpretability has been to identify the right units of analysis in large language models (LLMs) that causally explain their outputs. While early work focused on individual neurons, evidence that neurons often encode multiple concepts has motivated a shift toward analyzing directions in activation space. A key question is how to find directions that capture interpretable features in an unsupervised manner. Current methods rely on dictionary learning with sparse autoencoders (SAEs), commonly trained over residual stream activations to learn directions from scratch. However, SAEs often struggle in causal evaluations and lack intrinsic interpretability, as their learning is not explicitly tied to the computations of the model. Here, we tackle these limitations by directly decomposing MLP activations with semi-nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF), such that the learned features are (a) sparse linear combinations of co-activated neurons, and (b) mapped to their activating inputs, making them directly interpretable. Experiments on Llama 3.1, Gemma 2 and GPT-2 show that SNMF derived features outperform SAEs and a strong supervised baseline (difference-in-means) on causal steering, while aligning with human-interpretable concepts. Further analysis reveals that specific neuron combinations are reused across semantically-related features, exposing a hierarchical structure in the MLP’s activation space. Together, these results position SNMF as a simple and effective tool for identifying interpretable features and dissecting concept representations in LLMs.
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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
Sheriff Issaka, Keyi Wang, Yinka Ajibola, Oluwatumininu Samuel-Ipaye, Zhaoyi Zhang University of Wisconsin - Madison, Nicte Aguillon Jimenez University of Wisconsin - Madison, Evans Kofi Agyei, Abraham Lin 等 20 位作者
Despite representing nearly one-third of the world’s languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and empirical analysis. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion text tokens and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that even modest-scale models, when fine-tuned on targeted language data, achieve substantial improvements over untrained baselines, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a comparative analysis against Google Translate in which a 1B-parameter model matched or surpassed the commercial system in several languages including Yoruba and Twi, revealing that data scarcity, rather than model scale, constitutes the primary bottleneck for low-resource NLP, and suggesting that systematic dataset development yields disproportionate returns for low-resource languages.
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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
Yijiang River Dong, Tiancheng Hu University of Cambridge, Zheng Hui University of Cambridge, Caiqi Zhang, Ivan Vulić Google DeepMind, Andreea Bobu Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nigel Collier University of Cambridge
Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed for real-world tasks face a fundamental dilemma: user requests are underspecified, yet agents must decide whether to act on incomplete information or interrupt users for clarification. Existing approaches either rely on brittle confidence thresholds that require task-specific tuning, or fail to account for the varying stakes of different decisions. We introduce a decision-theoretic framework that resolves this trade-off through the Value of Information (VoI), enabling agents to dynamically weigh the expected utility gain from asking questions against the cognitive cost imposed on users. Our inference-time method requires no hyperparameter tuning and adapts seamlessly across contexts—from casual games to medical diagnosis. Experiments across four diverse domains (20 Questions, medical diagnosis, flight booking, and e-commerce) show that VoI consistently matches or exceeds the best manually-tuned baselines, achieving up to 1.36 utility points higher in high-cost settings. This work provides a parameter-free framework for adaptive agent communication that explicitly balances task risk, query ambiguity, and user effort.
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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
Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang NVIDIA Research, Jinchuan Tian, Hanrong Ye NVIDIA, Ankita Pasad NVIDIA, Szu-Wei Fu NVIDIA and Microsoft, Arushi Goel NVIDIA Research, Ryo Hachiuma NVIDIA 等 18 位作者
We introduce a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: knowing when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception. Our work is motivated by a crucial yet counterintuitive finding: naively fine-tuning an omni-model on both speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance, as the model can be easily misled by noisy hypotheses. To address this, our framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. This learnable reflection primitive proves effective in preventing the model from being derailed by flawed external candidates. We show that this agentic action mechanism generalizes naturally from speech recognition to complex, multiple-choice audio reasoning. Across the OpenASR leaderboard, which includes seven domain-diverse speech datasets, Speech-Hands consistently outperforms strong baselines by 12.1% WER on the OpenASR benchmark. The model also achieves 77.37% accuracy and high F1 on audio QA decisions, showing robust generalization and reliability across diverse audio question answering datasets. By unifying perception and decision-making, our work offers a practical path toward more reliable and resilient audio intelligence.
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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
Shubin Kim, Yejin Son Yonsei University, Junyeong Park Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Keummin Ka Yonsei University, Seungbeen Lee Yonsei University, Jaeyoung Lee, Hyeju Jang Indiana University, Alice Oh Google and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 等 9 位作者
Humor holds up a mirror to social perception: what we find funny often reflects who we are and how we judge others. When language models engage with humor, their reactions expose the social assumptions they have internalized from training data. In this paper, we investigate counterfactual unfairness through humor by observing how the model’s responses change when we swap who speaks and who is addressed while holding other factors constant. Our framework spans three tasks: humor generation refusal, speaker intention inference, and relational/societal impact prediction, covering both identity-agnostic humor and identity-specific disparagement humor. We introduce interpretable bias metrics that capture asymmetric patterns under identity swaps. Experiments across state-of-the-art models reveal consistent relational disparities: jokes told by privileged speakers are refused up to 67.5% more often, judged as malicious 64.7% more frequently, and rated up to 1.5 points higher in social harm on a 5-point scale. These patterns highlight how sensitivity and stereotyping coexist in generative models, complicating efforts toward fairness and cultural alignment.
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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
Minzheng Wang, Run Luo, Yanbo Wang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of sciences, Zichen Liu Google, Yuqiao Tan, Tao Tan, Nan Xu, Lu Wang China Three Gorges Corporation 等 9 位作者
While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for closed-ended tasks, extending it to open-ended social language games via self-play reveals a critical issue: evolution impasse. Due to the vast strategy space, language agents frequently converge to homogenized behaviors, leading to deterministic match outcomes that eliminate the gradient signals necessary for policy evolution. To tackle this issue, we propose Dual-scale Evolutionary Policy Training (DEPT) for social language games. DEPT introduces a time-scaled evolutionary perception mechanism that detects impasse by quantifying dual-scale value baseline divergence alongside match entropy. Upon perceiving the collapse, it then activates asymmetric advantage reshaping to dynamically modulate the optimization landscape for intervention. Thus, our method effectively restores gradient signals and enforces sustained strategic exploration. Extensive experiments on multiple social language games demonstrate that DEPT outperforms strong baselines, avoiding policy degeneration and driving the continuous evolution of social language 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
Minghe Shen, Zhuo Zhi, Chonghan Liu, Shuo Xing Google and Texas A&M University - College Station, Zhengzhong Tu Texas A&M University - College Station, Che Liu
Recent studies posit that Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) primarily amplifies behaviors inherent to the pre-training distribution rather than inducing new capabilities, but these insights are predominantly limited to language-only domains, leaving the dynamics of visual-centric spatial reasoning under-explored. To examine the impact of RLVR on the capability boundaries of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we introduce Ariadne, a controlled framework based on synthetic maze navigation where the reasoning difficulty is precisely regulated by path length and the number of turns. We demonstrate that applying RLVR extends the spatial reasoning boundary, achieving success on problems where the base policy VLM consistently attains 0% accuracy despite increasing pass@k sampling budgets, indicating that the optimized policy successfully navigates search spaces that were effectively unreachable by the base distribution. Furthermore, despite being trained exclusively on synthetic mazes, we evaluate the model on two real-world navigation benchmarks (MapBench and ReasonMap) in a zero-shot setting. The observed improvements in these out-of-domain tasks suggest genuine spatial reasoning capability expansion rather than mere sampling efficiency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MingheShen/Ariadne
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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
Despite the recent progress made in cross-prompt essay scoring, there is little analysis of what makes a state-of-the-art cross-prompt scorer work well. To this end, we present an empirical analysis of how the key components of a cross-prompt scorer interact with each other and impact its overall performance. In addition, we examine for the first time the application of transductive learning to cross-prompt scoring, which represents an important starting point for providing a practical way to improve cross-prompt scorers for use in the rarely-studied classroom setting without the need for additional labeled training data.
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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
Mukai Li, Linfeng Song Google, Zhenwen Liang Tencent AI Lab, Jiahao Xu Tencent AI Lab, Shansan Gong, Qi Liu University of Hong Kong, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), attaining substantial performance gains through widely adopted test-time scaling strategies, notably reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and increased sampling passes. However, they both introduce significant computational overhead for inference. Moreover, existing cost analyses typically regulate only the number of sampling passes, while neglecting the substantial disparities in sampling costs introduced by different scaling strategies. In this paper, we systematically compare the efficiency of different test-time scaling strategies for ATP models and demonstrate the inefficiency of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source approaches. We then investigate approaches to significantly reduce token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods that can be integrated into a unified EconRL pipeline for amplified benefits: (1) a dynamic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) switching mechanism designed to mitigate unnecessary token consumption, and (2) Diverse parallel-scaled reinforcement learning (RL) with trainable prefixes to enhance pass rates under constrained sampling passes. Experiments on miniF2F and ProofNet demonstrate that our EconProver-GD achieves comparable performance to baseline methods with only 12% of the computational cost. This work provides actionable insights for deploying lightweight ATP models without sacrificing 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
Juhyun Oh Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Haneul Yoo New York University, Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Alice Oh Google and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Code-switching, alternating between languages within a conversation, is natural for multilingual users, yet poses fundamental challenges for large language models (LLMs). When a user code-switches in their prompt to an LLM, they typically do not specify the expected language of the LLM response, and thus LLMs must infer the output language from contextual and pragmatic cues. We find that current LLMs systematically fail to align with this expectation, responding in undesired languages even when cues are clear to humans. We introduce OLA, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ Output Language Alignment in code-switched interactions. OLA focuses on Korean–English code-switching and spans simple intra-sentential mixing to instruction–content mismatches. Even frontier models frequently misinterpret implicit language expectation, exhibiting a systematic bias toward non-English responses. We further show this bias generalizes beyond Korean to Chinese and Indonesian pairs. Models also show instability through mid-response switching and language intrusions. Chain-of-Thought prompting fails to resolve these errors, indicating weak pragmatic reasoning about output language. However, Code-Switching Aware DPO with minimal data (~1K examples) substantially reduces misalignment, suggesting these failures stem from insufficient alignment rather than fundamental limitations. Our results highlight the need to align multilingual LLMs with users’ implicit expectations in real-world code-switched interactions.
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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
Diganta Misra Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems, Max-Planck Institute and ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Nizar Islah Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, University of Montreal, Université de Montréal, Victor May Google, Brice Rauby École Polytechnique de Montréal, Université de Montréal and Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Zihan Wang, Justine Gehring Gologic, Antonio Orvieto ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen AI Center, Tübingen, Germany, Muawiz Sajjad Chaudhary Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, University of Montreal, University of Montreal and Concordia University, Montreal 等 12 位作者
The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent version updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon 2.0, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon 2.0 rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon 2.0 enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods.
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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
Alejandro Hernández-Cano EPFL - EPF Lausanne, Alexander Hägele EPFL - EPF Lausanne, Allen Hao Huang EPFL - EPF Lausanne, Angelika Romanou, Antoni-Joan Solergibert, Barna Pásztor ETHZ - ETH Zurich, Bettina Messmer EPFL - EPF Lausanne, Dhia Garbaya 等 102 位作者
Open LLMs enable AI practitioners to control development costs by building on an existing foundation for downstream applications. While offering substantial promise, current models often fail to meet the needs of users needing open solutions aligned with responsible AI principles, including data compliance, transparency, and inclusivity. In this work, we present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address responsibility shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem, namely data responsibility and global representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting robots.txt exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of data memorization, we also adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. Apertus also drastically expands multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over approximately 1800 languages, with about 40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivaling or surpassing open-weight counterparts.
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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
Xiangjue Dong Texas A&M University - College Station, Cong Wang, Maria Teleki Texas A&M University - College Station, Millennium Bismay Amazon, Ruihong Huang Texas A&M University, James Caverlee Texas A&M University - College Station and Google
Persona-assigned Large Language Models can adopt diverse roles, enabling personalized and context-aware reasoning. However, even minor demographic perturbations in personas, such as simple pronoun swaps, can alter reasoning trajectories, leading to divergent sets of correct answers on reasoning benchmarks. We explore the potential of these variations as a constructive resource to improve LLM reasoning performance. We propose CHOIR (Collaborative Harmonization fOr Inference Robustness), a test-time framework that harmonizes a set of demographically perturbed, persona-conditioned reasoning signals into a unified prediction. CHOIR orchestrates a collaborative decoding process among counterfactual personas perturbed across dimensions of gender, race, religion, disability, and age, dynamically balancing agreement and divergence in their reasoning paths to improve performance. Experiments demonstrate that CHOIR consistently enhances LLM reasoning across model architectures, scales, and tasks. Improvements reach up to 20.1% for individual groups and 15.1% on average, and we show that CHOIR remains effective even when base personas are suboptimal.
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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
Nicholas Deas Columbia University, Ivan Ernesto Perez Mejia Google, Ellie Yang, Kathleen McKeown
Prior work evaluating emotion and affective understanding in large language models (LLMs) typically rely on predetermined label sets or focus on a singular evaluation task (e.g., emotion detection). We consider affective states, referring to the much broader variety of terms people use to label their emotional experiences. We evaluate multilingual language models’ understanding of affective states in English and Spanish through three different tasks: 1) identification, where models predict an affective state given text, 2) expression, where models generate text expressing a given affective state, and 3) verification, where models report whether a given term refers to an affective state. We show that performance on one task is not necessarily predictive of performance on another. Using these three tasks, we then begin to explore when and why models struggle to understand particular affective states compared to others. We examine systematic patterns in the affective state terms that are well and poorly understood by models, characterizing the working emotion vocabulary of LLMs.
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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