Inference-time search can substantially improve LLM reasoning when tasks admit deterministic verification, but existing methods largely refine single trajectories and lack a reliable mechanism for composing partial solutions across candidates. We propose contract-checked graph editing: represent each candidate as an interface-typed reasoning DAG and validate every nontrivial edit with a deterministic structural gate (acyclicity, namespace closure, schema validity, terminal constraints) before invoking the verifier. The gate certifies runnability only and emits auditable rejection reasons; semantic correctness is determined solely by the verifier. Instantiated in Genetic Inference Search (GIS) with Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct under strictly matched token budgets (8K tokens), contract-checked grafting increases verifier-runnable recombination from 41.2% to 92.8% and improves accuracy over rStar (+6.1 on MATH, +9.1 on MATH L5) while using 42% fewer verifier calls. The same operators transfer across outer loops (beam, best-first, MCTS) and to structured generation and code, outperforming execution-guided beam search on Spider (+2.8) and improving multi-file code generation on HumanEval-MF (+9.2).
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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
Sizhe Wang, Zhengren Wang Peking University, Dongsheng Ma, Yongan Yu Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and McGill University, McGill University, Rui Ling, Zhiyu li, Feiyu Xiong MemTensor (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., Wentao Zhang
Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes. We formalize this iterative, multi-turn paradigm as codeflow and introduce CodeFlowBench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LLMs’ ability to perform codeflow - implementing new functionality by reusing existing functions over multiple turns. CodeFlowBench comprises two complementary components: CodeFlowBench-Comp, a core collection of 5,000+ competitive programming problems from Codeforces updated via an automated pipeline and CodeFlowBench-Repo, which is sourced from GitHub repositories to better reflect real-world scenarios. Furthermore, a novel evaluation framework featured dual assessment protocol and structural metrics derived from dependency trees is introduced. Extensive experiments reveal significant performance degradation in multi-turn codeflow scenarios. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis illustrates that model performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity. These findings not only highlight the critical challenges for supporting real-world workflows, but also establish CodeFlowBench as an essential tool for advancing code generation research.
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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
Bin Chen Zhejiang Lab, Zhejiang Lab, Hongfei Ye, Huiyang Wang, Wenxi Liu University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yu Zhang, Furui Liu Zhejiang Lab & UCAS & Zhejiang University
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR trains LLMs on all generated tokens, rather than exploring which tokens actually contribute to reasoning. We propose AIPO(Adaptive–Information Policy Optimization), which focuses updates on those decisive tokens discovered on the fly. AIPO estimates each hidden state’s mutual information to score tokens. Policy gradients are then computed only on these critical tokens, using an advantage that blends information gain and verifiable correctness. To improve the efficiency of mutual-information estimation, AIPO adopts a Random–Fourier approximation of the Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion. Across five math and science benchmarks, AIPO yields up to +20% accuracy over strong RLVR baselines while updating merely 10% of tokens, demonstrating superior efficiency and effectiveness. Our findings highlight the importance of information–driven token selection for efficient and effective reinforcement learning of LLM reasoning.
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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
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
Junyao Yang, Chen Qian, Wen Shen Tongji University, Yong Liu Renmin University of China, Jing Shao Shanghai AI Laboratory, Dongrui Liu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with long chain-of-thought reasoning have recently achieved remarkable success. Yet, equipping domain-specialized models with such reasoning capabilities, referred to as “Reasoning + X”, remains a significant challenge. While model merging offers a promising training-free solution, existing methods often suffer from a destructive performance collapse: existing methods tend to both weaken reasoning depth and compromise domain-specific utility. Interestingly, we identify a counter-intuitive phenomenon underlying this failure: reasoning ability predominantly resides in parameter regions with low gradient sensitivity, contrary to the common assumption that domain capabilities correspond to high-magnitude parameters. Motivated by this insight, we propose ReasonAny, a novel merging framework that resolves the reasoning–domain performance collapse through Contrastive Gradient Identification. Experiments across safety, biomedicine, and finance domains show that ReasonAny effectively synthesizes “Reasoning + X” capabilities, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while retaining robust reasoning 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
Zidi Xiong, Yuping Lin Michigan State University, Wenya Xie University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Pengfei He Michigan State University, Zirui Liu University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Jiliang Tang Michigan State University, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Zhen Xiang University of Georgia
Memory is a critical component in large language model (LLM)-based agents, enabling them to store and retrieve past executions to improve task performance over time. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on how memory management choices impact the LLM agents’ behavior, especially their long-term performance. Specifically, we focus on two fundamental memory management operations that are widely used by many agent frameworks—memory addition and deletion—to systematically study their impact on the agent behavior. Through our quantitative analysis, we find that LLM agents display an experience-following property: high similarity between a task input and the input in a retrieved memory record often results in highly similar agent outputs. Our analysis further reveals two significant challenges associated with this property: error propagation, where inaccuracies in past experiences compound and degrade future performance, and misaligned experience replay, where some seemingly correct executions can provide limited or even misleading value as experiences. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate the importance of regulating experience quality within the memory bank and show that future task evaluations can serve as free quality labels for stored memory. Our findings offer insights into the behavioral dynamics of LLM agent memory systems and provide practical guidance for designing memory components that support robust, long-term agent 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
Chuanxin Zhang, Jiajun Liu, Yao He, Wenjun Ke Southeast University, Peng Wang, Yankun Le, Sirui Liu, Zhaoyu Yang
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a crucial paradigm for enhancing large language model (LLM) performance on multi-step reasoning tasks.However, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs invoke knowledge and propagate information across different steps of the CoT are poorly understood.To fill this gap, we propose a multi-stage probing framework that enforces structured reasoning with three explicit stages: keyword extraction, theorem generation, and computation execution.The framework integrates attention knockout to trace cross-layer information flow and theorem probing to examine how specific contents are encoded within representations.To enable controlled and stage-aligned analysis, we construct a structured CoT dataset that covers the mathematics and physics domains. Experiments on four instruction-tuned LLMs reveal distinct stage-specific patterns.First, keyword information is progressively aggregated into the final token in later layers.Second, theorem semantics are encoded in the mid-to-late layers and undergo two stages of propagation.Finally, parameter substitution is achieved through joint extraction by the final token and other tokens.The first parameter predominantly relies on the final token, whereas later parameters increasingly depend on information extracted by other tokens.Overall, our findings shed light on the neural implementation of CoT reasoning and provide actionable insights for developing more interpretable and reasoning-capable LLMs.We further evaluate a free-form prompting setting without labeled fields and observe consistent qualitative trends.
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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
Yifan Hu, Peiji Yang, Zhisheng Wang Tencent, Yicheng Zhong, Rui Liu Inner Mongolia University
Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MASR) aims to predict ”who spoke when and what” from multi-speaker speech, a key technology for multi-party dialogue understanding. However, most existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing ”when” and ”who”: some inject speaker cues before encoding (e.g., speaker masking), which can cause irreversible information loss; others fuse identity by mixing speaker posteriors after encoding, which may entangle acoustic content with speaker identity. This separation is brittle under rapid turn-taking and overlapping speech, often leading to degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose TellWhisper, a unified framework that jointly models speaker identity and temporal within the speech encoder. Specifically, we design TS\text{-}RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding: time coordinates are derived from frame indices, while speaker coordinates are derived from speaker activity and pause cues. By applying region-specific rotation angles, the model explicitly captures per-speaker continuity, speaker-turn transitions, and state dynamics, enabling the attention mechanism to simultaneously attend to ”when” and ”who”. Moreover, to estimate frame-level speaker activity, we develop Hyper\text{-}SD, which casts speaker classification in hyperbolic space to enhance inter-class separation and refine speaker-activity estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The project webpage is available at https://walker-hyf.github.io/TellWhisper.
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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
Heming Xia Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Cunxiao Du, Rui Li, Chak Tou Leong Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yongqi Li Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Wenjie Li The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. However, this lengthy reasoning process incurs substantial computational and latency overheads, hindering the practical deployment of LRMs. This work presents a new approach to mitigating overthinking in LRMs via black-box persuasive prompting. By treating LRMs as black-box communicators, we investigate how to persuade them to generate concise responses without compromising accuracy. We introduce Whisper, an iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality persuasive prompts from diverse perspectives. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Whisper consistently reduces token usage while preserving performance. Notably, Whisper achieves a 3\times reduction in average response length on simple GSM8K questions for the Qwen3 series and delivers an average \sim40% token reduction overall. For closed-source APIs, Whisper reduces token usage on MATH-500 by 46% for Claude-3.7 and 50% for Gemini-2.5. Further analysis reveals the broad applicability of Whisper across data domains, model scales, and families, underscoring the potential of black-box persuasive prompting as a practical strategy for enhancing LRM efficiency.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Tanmoy Chakraborty Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Weiwen Xu Alibaba Group, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou A*STAR, Chang Liu Shanghai University of Finance and Economics 等 35 位作者
The global deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to evaluate their cultural alignment. However, assessing genuine “cultural awareness” across modalities (text, vision, speech) and languages remains a significant challenge. To comprehensively investigate this domain, we propose MMAC, a systematic framework that encompasses a tri-modally aligned cultural benchmark creation pipeline and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities, evaluate cross-lingual and cross-modal consistency, and verify cultural knowledge generalization and grounding validity. Given the prevailing Western cultural bias in current models, we focus on 8 Asian countries as our dataset foundation to more acutely reveal potential cultural deficiencies in LLMs. Our dataset, MMAC-bench, features 27,000 human-curated questions across 10 languages. Crucially, it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech, enabling direct cross-modal transfer tests. Each question consists of multiple-choice options accompanied by open-ended generated explanations, where 79% require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. We probe the causes of modal divergence, offering insights into fostering culturally robust MLLMs.
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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
Jiaqi Liu, Shi Qiu, Mairui Li, Bingzhou Li, Haonian Ji, Siwei Han, Xinyu Ye, Peng Xia 等 36 位作者
Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.