Ke Wang, Shuangqi Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Pascal Frossard
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL. A key limitation is its off-policy objective: SFT fits fixed demonstrations token by token, including targets poorly aligned with the model's pretrained distribution, which can lead to overfitting. A recent line of work addresses this issue by assigning larger training weights to tokens better aligned with the current model's predictive distribution, with the intuition that fitting these tokens are less distortive to the model's knowledge and representations. However, computing the token weights from the model that is currently fine-tuned entangles token weights with the optimization trajectory, inducing a self-reinforcing loop which concentrates the supervision signal to a narrow set of initially preferred tokens. To address this, we propose PriFT (Prior-support guided Fine-Tuning), which derives token weights from a frozen pretrained reference to obtain a stable reweighting signal unaffected by fine-tuning. This signal estimates prior support: the extent to which each target token is supported by the pretrained distribution. By reweighting tokens according to their prior support, PriFT limits excessive adaptation to targets requiring substantial deviation from the pretrained distribution and improves SFT generalization. We introduce two instantiations: PriFT-prob uses pretrained target-token probability, while PriFT-mass selects tokens by cumulative probability mass under the pretrained distribution. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and medical QA, PriFT achieves state-of-the-art results among SFT baselines, while also providing a stronger initialization for subsequent RL.
Hao-Yuan He, Peng-Fei Liu, Chen Chen, Si Shen, Quan He, Runzhou Liu, Xinqi Li, Zhenhua Dong 等 9 位作者
Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in a single target forward pass. However, as the context grows, existing state-of-the-art drafters become increasingly expensive, eroding the very efficiency advantage they are designed to provide. We argue that this scaling is unnecessary. A standalone language model must grow with its prefix because it is solely responsible for every token it produces. A drafter, by contrast, only proposes candidates; the target catches and corrects every error before any token is committed. The drafter's decoding cost can therefore be made entirely independent of the prefix length. We introduce LongSpark, a block-diffusion drafter that achieves this by extracting fixed-size, multiscale views from the target's verification pass, thereby eliminating the need for a growing persistent state. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LongSpark achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end efficiency across multiple model scales and realistic serving conditions. Notably, it delivers the lowest time-per-output-token on long-context tasks while reducing the drafter's context state by several orders of magnitude.
Zheng Zhang, Yifan Wu, Yuxiang Zhou, Qi Liu, Qingyang Mao, Ning Li, Weibo Gao, Qiyuan Shi 等 10 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for fairness, yet most existing benchmarks audit one sensitive attribute at a time. This single-attribute paradigm can miss intersectional harms, where multiple attributes interact non-additively and produce failures that are invisible under marginal evaluation. We introduce ComFair, a configurable benchmark that converts existing fairness data into 479,066 controlled Dual- and Multi-attribute instances and pairs every augmented instance with its task-equivalent source. Across Recognition, Selection, Continuation, and Conversation, this pairing supports a unified audit of performance or bias-score shifts, how often added attributes introduce new errors or mask existing ones, and model-ranking stability. Experiments on ten LLMs show task- and subgroup-dependent sensitivity: discriminative tasks expose both transition directions even when aggregate changes are modest, generative tasks exhibit larger and directionally asymmetric shifts, and rankings vary with attribute composition. ComFair therefore provides a scalable controlled sensitivity audit---rather than a model of the natural joint distribution of identities---for testing the robustness of fairness-benchmark conclusions beyond single-attribute settings.
AI agents must decide when another search is worth its cost. Answer-success probabilities capture question difficulty, while this decision requires estimating the additional benefit of search. We introduce SearchHorizonBench, a benchmark for learning and evaluating search value from execution experience. Paired continuations and repeated executions separate expected search gain from generation noise and connect prediction quality to decision utility. The resource contains 45,632 executions across 3,168 questions. On 1,632 held-out questions, historical calibration reduces Brier error by 16.2%, with the improvement concentrated in success-level information. Search gains have a standard deviation of 21.4 percentage points, and tested historical estimators explain less than 2% of this variance in point estimates. Matched-configuration learning curves probe this distinction across training scales. At the reference token price, free selection observations yield a 2.49-point utility opportunity over the best constant action, driven primarily by gain information. Reusable histories, frozen splits, strong baselines and scoring tools provide a common foundation for developing and evaluating value-aware search agents.
Reusable Web-agent verification requires a rule to follow changing requirements and support subsequent execution. We introduce AgentProofBench, which connects paired tests of a frozen acceptance rule to execution from identical saved openings. The resource spans 97 tasks, 79 families, and four Web services. Experiments with DeepSeek Flash/Pro establish two linked measurements. Across 48 families, complete-panel and decision-replay tests retain 82/96 Flash and 79/96 Pro source programs; paired reuse-rebuild BA intervals are [-5.47, 1.57] and [-10.16, 0.00] percentage points. Across 22 execution families, deployment-state panel correctness separates program assignments whose two saved openings are both delivered correctly: 32/33 assignments with error-free panels, versus 1/11 with panel errors. All reference-defined program-gate regressions and withheld deliveries occur in the latter group. Neutral continuation attains the highest correct delivery under the tested generic feedback, providing a concrete baseline for measuring the value added by a gate. Released instructions, states, programs, reference rules, and trajectories connect each test failure to its execution consequences. AgentProofBench makes reusable verification assessable at both the requirement and policy levels.
Federated continual learning (FCL) has attracted considerable interest by enabling local clients to continually acquire knowledge from new tasks. However, most FCL methods assume that the global server has prior knowledge of the arrival times and number of categories for new tasks, which is unrealistic in the real world. Furthermore, they neglect the importance of positive inter-task semantic relationships when learning new tasks and are significantly affected by irrelevant relationships from old tasks, thereby exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Task Relevance-driven Prompt Expansion (TRPE) model. Specifically, to eliminate the reliance on prior knowledge of new tasks, we propose an out-of-distribution detector to identify the arrival of new tasks within local clients, along with a radius-adaptive DBSCAN to infer the quantity of categories in new tasks on the proxy server. Moreover, to explore positive inter-task relationships, we calculate the affinity between the original gradient for learning new task and its gradient orthogonal to the feature space of old tasks to evaluate semantic relevance between old and new tasks from a global perspective. Then, we use this global task relevance to determine the key-prompt pair for new tasks and identify highly related old tasks. After concatenating their prompts for training, we can leverage such positive inter-task relations to improve the continual learning of newly arriving tasks. To balance the learning of new tasks and the forgetting of old ones, a soft orthogonality constraint is applied to the local key and prompt gradients. Experiments spanning diverse datasets and backbones confirm the efficacy of our TRPE model.
Language agents increasingly act through external tools and interactive environments, making the interface between the model and its executable capabilities part of the decision process. Model Context Protocol (MCP) and command-line interfaces (CLI) can expose the same semantic operations through markedly different model-facing representations. We study whether these representational differences change agent behavior when executable capabilities are matched. We introduce Matched Interface Comparison and Analysis (MICA), which renders MCP and CLI from a shared semantic action contract and routes decoded actions through the same runtime. Across six models and three interactive environments, matched interfaces produce substantial differences in task performance and interaction cost. These effects extend beyond surface validity to semantic action selection, failure pathways, and recovery. Matched-state probes localize sensitivity to capability presentation, realization, and feedback. Paired natural trajectories reveal structured divergence in 94.3% of 2,004 episodes and show that early differences propagate through subsequent interaction. This analysis identifies interface realization as a direct intervention boundary. We therefore introduce Decoupled Action Realization and Targeted Repair (DART), which preserves validated semantic commitments while repairing interface-specific realization. DART improves benchmark score in all six evaluated settings by up to 9.0 points and reduces MCP token cost in all three environments by up to 27.1k tokens per task. Together, these results establish interface representation as part of the closed-loop decision environment shaping agent behavior.
Yunqi Liu, Peiyu Wang, Bingli Wang, Leo Luo, Xuanwu Song, Xudong Ma, Hongxin Li, Yaxin Du 等 24 位作者
Command-line interface (CLI) agents increasingly execute longer-horizon tasks, yet existing benchmarks either assume that user instructions remain fixed throughout execution or evaluate task outcomes without capturing runtime collaboration quality. In this paper, we present REALCLI, a paired benchmark that unifies the evaluation of task execution and human-agent collaboration quality on realistic CLI tasks. To comprehensively measure collaboration, REALCLI builds a five-dimensional framework, operationalized into 22 sub-dimensions and 51 interaction scenario templates. REALCLI provides two modes for paired comparison: REALCLI-EXEC supplies complete specifications upfront, whereas REALCLI-COLLAB introduces a scripted user that delivers progressive information, corrections, constraint revisions, and authorization decisions. Evaluations reveal profound capability gaps in frontier agents: the best configuration attains an average score of only 49.2%, and when evaluated by the joint collaboration score ($J_{\mathrm{collab}}$), the peak performance reaches merely 37.6%. These results show that task effectiveness diverges sharply from collaboration quality, with models consistently struggling in steerability, trust calibration, and safety boundary management. REALCLI provides a rigorous, reproducible foundation for measuring and advancing collaborative CLI agents.
Zixu Li Shandong University, Yupeng Hu, Zhiheng Fu, Zhiwei Chen Shandong University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Liqiang Nie Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Shandong University
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an important image retrieval paradigm that enables users to retrieve a target image using a multimodal query that consists of a reference image and modification text. Although research on CIR has made significant progress, prevailing setups still rely simple modification texts that typically cover only a limited range of salient changes, which induces two limitations highly relevant to practical applications, namely Insufficient Entity Coverage and Clause-Entity Misalignment. In order to address these issues and bring CIR closer to real-world use, we construct two instruction-rich multi-modification datasets, M-FashionIQ and M-CIRR. In addition, we propose TEMA, the Text-oriented Entity Mapping Architecture, which is the first CIR framework designed for multi-modification while also accommodating simple modifications. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that TEMA’s superiority in both original and multi-modification scenarios, while maintaining an optimal balance between retrieval accuracy and computational efficiency. Our codes and constructed multi-modification dataset (M-FashionIQ and M-CIRR) are available at https://github.com/lee-zixu/ACL26-TEMA/
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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
Xueting Li, Qi Liu, Chenghao Xu Hohai University, Xu Yang, Guangtao Lyu, Jiahua Li Xidian University, Cheng Deng
High-resolution visual tokens impose substantial computational burdens owing to extreme redundancy in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs). Existing visual token pruning methods typically leverage simple metrics derived from human experience, such as attention or similarity, to rank and select tokens within a highly entangled feature space. However, these metrics lack interpretability and often introduce human bias, failing to capture the genuine semantic significance of tokens, especially amidst the inherent semantic complexity and ambiguity of visual tokens. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a novel Semantically Comprehensive Token Selection (SCTS) method for unbiased, interpretable visual token pruning via a concept-driven paradigm. To unravel the model’s intrinsic semantic representation mechanism, we first introduce a Sparse Autoencoder to disentangle visual features into an interpretable space, with each dimension encoding a distinct semantic concept. We then formulate the token pruning task as a Maximum Concept Coverage problem, quantifying the Marginal Semantic Gain (MSG) of each token’s contribution to uncovered concepts and iteratively selecting tokens with the highest MSG. This concept-centric approach prioritizes tokens with unique semantic contributions, guaranteeing semantic comprehensiveness while preserving robust performance even at high compression ratios. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLM architectures and benchmarks verify that SCTS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a superior trade-off between computational efficiency and semantic completeness.
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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
Ning Li, Zheng Zhang, Zhenya Huang University of Science and Technology of China, Rui Li, Yi Zhan, Yinbo Luo, Qi Liu University of Science and Technology of China, Enhong Chen University of Science and Technology of China
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has driven the deployment of LLM-based AI tutors on online learning platforms. This widespread adoption highlights an urgent need for systematic benchmarks to evaluate their tutoring capabilities. However, existing evaluations predominantly focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LongTutor, a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring grounded in formative assessment theory. Built from expert-annotated real-world learning logs, LongTutor evaluates LLMs across three progressive tasks: historical evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. Our experiments reveal a critical capability mismatch: while LLMs excel at evidence acquisition, they struggle to effectively leverage long-term history for accurate diagnosis and adaptive teaching. To enable scalable benchmark expansion, we further propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline, paving the way toward truly long-term AI tutoring 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
Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu University of Science and Technology of China, Siyuan Liang Nanyang Technological University, Ning Li, Zirui Hu Nanyang Technological University, Weibo Gao University of Science and Technology of China, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang University of Science and Technology of China 等 11 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency.
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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
Shang Qin, Jingheng Ye Northeastern University, Yinghui Li Tencent, Hai-Tao Zheng Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Qi Li, Jinxiao Shan, Zhixing Li, Hong-Gee Kim
The growing demand for automated writing assistance in diverse academic domains highlights the need for robust Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) systems that can adapt across disciplines. However, existing CGEC research largely lacks dedicated benchmarks for multi-disciplinary academic writing, overlooking continual learning (CL) as a promising solution to handle domain-specific linguistic variation and prevent catastrophic forgetting. To fill this crucial gap, we introduce CL^2GEC, the first Continual Learning benchmark for Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction, designed to evaluate adaptive CGEC across multiple academic fields. Our benchmark includes 10,000 human-annotated sentences spanning 10 disciplines, each exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and error patterns. CL^2GEC focuses on evaluating grammatical error correction in a continual learning setting, simulating sequential exposure to diverse academic disciplines to reflect real-world editorial dynamics. We evaluate large language models under sequential tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and four representative CL algorithms, using both standard GEC metrics and continual learning metrics adapted to task-level variation. Experimental results reveal that regularization-based methods mitigate forgetting more effectively than replay-based or naive sequential approaches. Our benchmark provides a rigorous foundation for future research in adaptive grammatical error correction across diverse academic 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
Pei Wang, Yanan Wu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xiaoshuai Song, Weixun Wang Alibaba Group, Gengru Chen Alibaba Group, Zhongwen Li, Kezhong Yan, Qi Liu 等 16 位作者
Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in e-commerce shopping. To perform thorough, user-tailored product searches, agents should interpret personal preferences, engage in multi-turn dialogues, and ultimately retrieve and discriminate among highly similar products. However, existing research has yet to provide a unified simulation environment that consistently captures all of these aspects, and always focuses solely on evaluation benchmarks without training support. In this paper, we introduce ShopSimulator, a large-scale and challenging Chinese shopping environment. Leveraging ShopSimulator, we evaluate LLMs across diverse scenarios, finding that even the best-performing models achieve less than 40% full-success rate. Error analysis reveals that agents struggle with deep search and product selection in long trajectories, fail to balance the use of personalization cues, and to effectively engage with users. Further training exploration provides practical guidance for overcoming these weaknesses, with the combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) yielding significant performance improvements.
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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
Runxuan Liu, Xianhao Ou Harbin Institute of Technology, Xinyan Ma Harbin Institute of Technology, Jiyuan Wang, Jiafeng Liang Harbin Institute of Technology, Jiaqi Li Tianjin Normal University, Tao He Harbin Institute of Technology, Zheng Chu Harbin Institute of Technology 等 16 位作者
Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily generated as plain text, where performing semantic evaluation on such unstructured data creates a computational bottleneck during training. Despite RLVR-based optimization, existing methods still suffer from coarse-grained supervision, reward hacking, high training costs, and poor generalization.To address these issues, we propose the Graph Reasoning Paradigm (GRP), which realizes structured and symbolic reasoning, implemented via graph-structured representations with step-level cognitive labels. Building upon GRP, we further design Process-Aware Stratified Clipping Group Relative Policy Optimization (PASC-GRPO), which leverages structured evaluation to replace semantic evaluation, achieves process-aware verification through graph-structured outcome rewards, and mitigates reward hacking via stratified clipping advantage estimation. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Data, models, and code will be released later.
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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
Ziang Chen Tsinghua University, Guannan Li, Fanlin Ji, Yipeng Kang National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Jiaqi Li Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, Muhan Zhang Peking University, Yangtao Zhang, Li Tianjiao 等 12 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong cross-domain capabilities, yet their competence in specialized professional tasks remains underexamined. Existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated tasks or exam-style questions, failing to capture the procedural interdependencies and adjudicative rigor inherent in professional practice. To bridge this gap, we construct JurisBench, a vertical, depth-oriented, domain-specific benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across key stages of Chinese civil litigation. JurisBench introduces a Linear Depth Simulation track that mirrors the cognitive workflow of professional judges through four sequential, dependency-aware phases: Cause of Action prediction, Focus of Disputes identification, Rationale of the Judgment generation, and Result of the Judgment determination. Results reveal an “illusion of competence”: state-of-the-art models exhibit marked performance degradation in end-to-end pipelines due to cascading error propagation. We identify precise statutory grounding as a persistent bottleneck, highlighting a critical gap between fluent linguistic output and judicial reliability. JurisBench shifts evaluation from isolated legal knowledge to workflow-level task execution, providing a diagnostic framework for legal AI and a template for benchmark design in specialized 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
Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tencent YouTu Lab, Jian Li Tencent Youtu, Jiangning Zhang 等 9 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an important means of enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, most existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. To overcome these limitations, we propose Disco-RAG, a discourse-aware framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. Our method constructs intra-chunk discourse trees to capture local hierarchies and builds inter-chunk rhetorical graphs to model cross-passage coherence. These structures are jointly integrated into a planning blueprint that conditions the generation. Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach. Disco-RAG achieves state-of-the-art results on the benchmarks without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the important role of discourse structure in advancing RAG 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
Yongqi Li, Hao Lang, Tieyun Qian Wuhan University, Yongbin Li Alibaba Group
Vision-language models are increasingly employed as multimodal conversational agents (MCAs) for diverse conversational tasks. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely explored for adapting MCAs to various human-AI interaction scenarios. Despite showing great enhancement in generalization performance, fine-tuning MCAs via RL still faces challenges in handling the extremely large text token space. To address this, we learn a compact latent action space for RL fine-tuning instead. Specifically, we adopt the learning from observation mechanism to construct the codebook for the latent action space, where future observations are leveraged to estimate current latent actions that could further be used to reconstruct future observations. However, the scarcity of paired image-text data hinders learning a codebook with sufficient coverage. Thus, we leverage both paired image-text data and text-only data to construct the latent action space, using a cross-modal projector for transforming text embeddings into image-text embeddings. We initialize the cross-modal projector on paired image-text data, and further train it on massive text-only data with a novel cycle consistency loss to enhance its robustness. We show that our latent action based method outperforms competitive baselines on two conversation tasks across various RL algorithms. Code and data are available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/MMLatentAction.
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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
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
Yaowenqi Liu, Bingxu Meng, Rui Pan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yuxing Liu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Jerry Huang, Jiaxuan You, Tong Zhang UIUC
The field of AI research is advancing at an unprecedented pace, enabling automated hypothesis generation and experimental design across diverse domains such as biology, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Despite these advancements, there remains a significant gap in the availability of scalable advising systems capable of providing high-quality, well-reasoned feedback to refine proposed hypotheses and experimental designs. To address this challenge, we explore key factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems, including model size, data reweighting, context length, confidence estimation, and structured reasoning processes. Our findings reveal that a relatively small model, when equipped with a well-compressed literature database and a structured reasoning framework, can outperform powerful general-purpose language models such as Deepseek-R1 in terms of acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. Moreover, when limited to high-confidence predictions, our system achieves an acceptance rate exceeding 90% on the ICLR 2025 test set, underscoring its potential to significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of hypothesis generation and experimental design.
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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
Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu University of California, San Diego, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan University of California, San Diego, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang University of California, San Diego 等 12 位作者
To close the gap between LLM-based agents and humans in planning and reasoning, agents need large-scale, diverse environments for continuous learning—yet building such environments is itself prohibitively expensive. We present C-World, an environment creation system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. We define a complete agent environment through four components: an Action Space of 5,571 format-unified tools across 204 common applications, a Task Distribution engine that synthesizes long-horizon workflows with wild constraints, a Transition Function implemented as a state controller that injects realistic failures and perturbations, and a Reward Signal combining verifiable metrics with LLM-based judgment. C-World operates in two modes: a realistic mode grounded in live API execution, and a synthesized mode powered by the World Engine, which approximates tool behavior without live service access, enabling scalable environment creation—including environments for domains and tools that do not yet exist in the real world. Evaluation of nine state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that planning ability is uniformly strong but execution remains the bottleneck, and that constraint following—not tool invocation—is the dominant failure mode. The World Engine achieves Spearman \rho = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution, and fine-tuning on just 1,170 C-World trajectories outperforms baselines trained on 119k samples, demonstrating C-World’s dual value as a rigorous evaluation environment and a scalable data engine. Our code and data are available at https://ziqiao-git.github.io/C-World/.
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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
Existing datasets for evaluating text-to-image generation focus mostly on real-life images, which poses challenges for assessing academicfigure generation given real scientific captions, which is a hot topic in AI for Science. To fill the gap, we propose HE4AFG, a novel datasetwhich first provides a Holistic Evaluation for Academic caption-to-Figure Generation (AFG). Specifically, HE4AFG collects real figure captions from 8 scientific domains and finally generates 3,900 evaluation samples (particularly, including multi-panel figures) using 5 mainstream large multimodal models (LMMs). For each sample, we provide high-quality human ratings in terms of three aspects—scientific aesthetic (SA), topic relevance (TR), and attribute correctness (AC). Moreover, we present two trainable models: (1) HE4AFG-E, an automated Evaluation model for AFG, which generates aspect-aware training examples and then use them to train three aspect-specific evaluation modules via contrastive learning; (2) HE4AFG-R, an automated Refinement model, which generates and utilizes feedback on the quality of the figures (e.g., unfaithful elements) to continuously improve AFG. Extensive experiments on HE4AFG demonstrate the effectiveness and performance advantages of our 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
Language agents, i.e., LLM agents, progress rapidly and are increasingly deployed in production environments. This trend underscores the urgent need for rigorous and realistic evaluations. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings. They typically rely on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlook critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. Consequently, they understate the difficulty of real deployments, where uncertainty and noise are ubiquitous and agents must proactively explore the environment to uncover new tools. To bridge this gap, we present AgentGym2, a new evaluation framework with task instances grounded in real-world end-to-end working demands. Beyond reasoning and planning, it measures agents’ ability to execute end-to-end procedures, discover tools via exploration, compose tools for unseen tasks, and remain robust to noisy and underspecified information. Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2, revealing a substantial gap between the capability of current agents and the demands of real-world applications.
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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
Runyang You Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Meng Liu Shandong University and Shandong Jianzhu University, Wenjie Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Liqiang Nie Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Shandong University, Wenjie Li The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances in latent reasoning, where intermediate reasoning unfolds in continuous vector spaces, offer a more efficient alternative to explicit Chain-of-Thought, yet whether such latent models can similarly benefit from parallel TTS remains open, mainly due to the absence of sampling mechanisms in continuous space, and the lack of probabilistic signals for advanced trajectory aggregation. This work enables parallel TTS for latent reasoning models by addressing the above issues. For sampling, we introduce two uncertainty-inspired stochastic strategies: Monte Carlo Dropout and Additive Gaussian Noise. For aggregation, we design a Latent Reward Model (LatentRM) trained with step-wise contrastive objective to score and guide latent reasoning. Extensive experiments and visualization analyses show that both sampling strategies scale effectively with compute and exhibit distinct exploration dynamics, while LatentRM enables effective trajectory selection. Together, our explorations open a new direction for scalable inference in continuous spaces. Code and checkpoint are included as supplementary materials.GitHub Project: https://github.com/ModalityDance/LatentTTS
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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
Qiancheng Xu Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Fan Liu Southeast University, Hongru Wang, Min Yang, Wenjie Li The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) has emerged as a promising direction by extending Large Language Models’ (LLMs) capabilities with external tools during reasoning. Existing TIR methods typically rely on external tool documentation during reasoning. However, this leads to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency. To mitigate these issues, we explore Tool-Internalized Reasoning (TInR), aiming at facilitating reasoning with tool knowledge internalized into LLMs. Achieving this goal presents notable requirements, including tool internalization and tool-reasoning coordination. To address them, we propose TInR-U, a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage. TInR-U is trained through a three-phase pipeline: 1) tool internalization with a bidirectional knowledge alignment strategy; 2) supervised fine-tuning warm-up using high-quality reasoning annotations, and 3) reinforcement learning with TInR-specific rewards. We comprehensively evaluate our method across in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Experiment results show that TInR-U achieves superior performance in both settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency. The codes are attached in the supplementary file for review.
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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
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.
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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
Most ATP benchmarks embed the final answer within the formal statement — a convention we call “Easy Mode” — a design that simplifies the task relative to what human competitors face and may lead to optimistic estimates of model capability.We call the stricter, more realistic setting “Hard Mode”: the system must independently discover the answer before constructing a formal proof.To enable Hard Mode research, we make two contributions.First, we release MiniF2F-Hard and FIMO-Hard, expert-reannotated Hard Mode variants of two widely-used ATP benchmarks.Second, we introduce Discover And Prove (DAP), an agentic framework that uses LLM natural-language reasoning with explicit self-reflection to discover answers, then rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers.DAP sets the state of the art: on CombiBench it raises solved problems from 7 (previous SOTA, Pass@16) to 10; on PutnamBench it is the first system to formally prove 36 theorems in Hard Mode — while simultaneously revealing that state-of-the-art LLMs exceed 80% answer accuracy on the same problems where formal provers manage under 10%, exposing a substantial gap that Hard Mode benchmarks are uniquely suited to measure.
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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
Xingrun Xing, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Boyan Gao, Yiming Liang, Haokun Lin, Xianlin Zeng, Guoqi Li Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences 等 9 位作者
Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with 100M \sim 1B parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.
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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
Qiushi Sun University of Hong Kong, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie University of Hong Kong, Fangzhi Xu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng Nanjing University, Zehao Li University of Science and Technology of China 等 14 位作者
Computer-using agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like capabilities in operating digital environments like mobile platforms. While these agents hold great promise for advancing digital automation, their potential for unsafe operations, such as system compromise and privacy leakage, is raising significant concerns. Detecting these safety concerns across the vast and complex operational space of mobile environments presents a formidable challenge that remains critically underexplored. To establish a foundation for mobile agent safety research, we introduce MobileRisk-Live, a dynamic sandbox environment accompanied by a safety detection benchmark comprising realistic trajectories with fine-grained annotations. Built upon this, we propose OS-Sentinel, a novel hybrid safety detection framework that synergistically combines a Formal Verifier for detecting explicit system-level violations with a VLM-based Contextual Judge for assessing contextual risks and agent actions. Experiments show that achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. Further analysis provides critical insights that foster the development of safer and more reliable autonomous mobile agents. Our code, environment, and data are available at https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Sentinel-Home/.
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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