Li Zheng, Xin Zhang Ant Group and Microsoft, Shuyi He, Fei Li Wuhan University, Chong Teng Wuhan University, Jiang-Ming Yang, Donghong Ji Wuhan University, Zhuang Li Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Accurate comprehension and controllable generation of emotion and rhetoric are pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing studies mostly rely on external optimizations, lacking in-depth exploration of internal representation mechanisms, thus failing to achieve fine-grained steering at the neuron level. A handful of works on neurons are confined to emotions, neglecting rhetoric neurons and their intrinsic connections. Traditional neuron masking also exhibits counterintuitive phenomena, making reliable verification of neuron functionality infeasible. To address these issues, we systematically investigate the neurons representation mechanisms and inherent associations of 6 emotion categories and 4 core rhetorical devices. We propose a neuron identification framework that integrates multi-dimensional screening, and design an adaptive masking method incorporating dynamic filtering, attenuation masking, and feedback optimization, enabling reliable functional validation of neuron functionality. Through neuron regulation, we achieve directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. Experiments on 5 commonly used datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, providing a novel paradigm for the fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric expressions in LLMs.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Ziqing Wang, Kexin Zhang, Zihan Zhao, Yibo Wen, Abhishek Pandey, Han Liu Northwestern University, Kaize Ding Northwestern University
Large language models (LLMs) are introducing a paradigm shift in molecular discovery by enabling text-guided interaction with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations, with emerging extensions to incorporate multi-modal inputs. To advance this emerging field, this survey provides an up-to-date and forward-looking review of the emerging use of LLMs for two central tasks: molecule generation and molecule optimization. We organize our survey around four fundamental challenges that have emerged as critical evaluation dimensions in recent studies: ensuring validity, enhancing synthesizability, achieving precise property control, and maximizing diversity. Based on this, we systematically analyze how current LLM learning paradigms are applied to tackle each challenge, revealing the distinct capabilities and inherent limitations of each approach. In addition, we include the commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols aligned with these challenges. We conclude by discussing future directions, positioning this survey as a resource for researchers working at the intersection of LLMs and molecular science. A continuously updated reading list is available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/Awesome-LLM-Centric-Molecular-Discovery.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Junhao Liu, Haonan Yu, Zhenyu Yan, Xin Zhang Peking University
Post-hoc explanations provide transparency and are essential for guiding model optimization, such as prompt engineering and data sanitation. However, applying model-agnostic techniques to Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by prohibitive computational costs, rendering these tools dormant for real-world applications. To revitalize model-agnostic interpretability, we propose a budget-friendly proxy framework that leverages efficient models to approximate the decision boundaries of expensive LLMs. We introduce a screen-and-apply mechanism to statistically verify local alignment before deployment. Our empirical evaluation confirms that proxy explanations achieve over 90% fidelity with only 9.5% of the oracle’s cost. Building on this foundation, we demonstrate the actionable utility of our framework in prompt compression and poisoned example removal. Results show that reliable proxy explanations effectively guide optimization, transforming interpretability from a passive observation tool into a scalable primitive for LLM development. Additionally, we open-source code and datasets to facilitate future research.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang Zhejiang University, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang Zhejiang University, Qiqi Luo Alibaba Group, Jin Guang Zheng Alibaba Group, Zhixin Zhang
Debt collection is a critical negotiation task in the financial industry, with strong practical relevance and exceptional academic value as a behaviorally rich, high-stakes testbed for human-centered dialogue systems. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in dialogue and negotiation, effectively evaluating their performance in this complex scenarios remains a major challenge: existing benchmarks uniformly assume users to be static, rational agents with fixed preferences, failing to capture the rich behavioral heterogeneity inherent in real-world debt collection. To bridge this gap, we propose DebtBench, the first public persona-enriched debt collection benchmark, that highlights behavioral heterogeneity in negotiation. Moreover, we develop DebtGPT, a debt collection agent trained to jointly optimize financial recovery and interaction experience. Our experimental results, using 16 state-of-the-art LLMs, find that most existing models struggle in this complex but realistic scenarios, whereas DebtGPT outperforms all open-source baselines and achieves performance on par with GPT-4o. The code and data are available at https://github.com/yyuhhhh13/DebtNegotiation.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Can Jin Rutgers University, Rui Wu, Tong Che NVIDIA, Qixin Zhang Nanyang Technological University, Hongwu Peng Adobe Research, Jiahui Zhao University of Connecticut, Zhenting Wang Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Wenqi Wei Fordham University 等 13 位作者
Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) adhere to safety principles without refusing benign requests remains a significant challenge. While OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance the safety of its o-series models through reasoning over detailed “code-like” safety rules, the effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs, which typically lack advanced reasoning capabilities, is understudied. In this work, we systematically evaluate the impact of explicitly specifying extensive safety codes versus demonstrating them through illustrative cases. We find that referencing explicit codes inconsistently improves harmlessness and systematically degrades helpfulness, whereas training on case-augmented simple codes yields more robust and generalized safety behaviors. By guiding LLMs with case-augmented reasoning instead of extensive code-like safety rules, we avoid rigid adherence to narrowly enumerated rules and enable broader adaptability. Building on these insights, we propose CADA, a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for LLMs utilizing reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains. CADA effectively enhances harmlessness, improves robustness against attacks, and reduces over-refusal while preserving utility across diverse benchmarks, offering a practical alternative to rule-only DA for improving safety while maintaining helpfulness.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai The Chinese University of Hong Kong 等 14 位作者
Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, fostering a promising hybrid paradigm for MLLM-based mobile automation. However, systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MAS-Bench, a benchmark that pioneers the evaluation of GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. Beyond merely using predefined shortcuts, MAS-Bench assesses an agent’s capability to autonomously generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. It features 139 complex tasks across 11 real-world applications, a knowledge base of 88 predefined shortcuts (APIs, deep-links, RPA scripts), and 9 evaluation metrics. Experiments demonstrate that hybrid agents achieve up to 68.3% success rate and 39% greater execution efficiency than GUI-only counterparts. Furthermore, our evaluation framework effectively reveals the quality gap between predefined and agent-generated shortcuts, validating its capability to assess shortcut generation methods. MAS-Bench addresses the lack of systematic benchmarks for GUI-shortcut hybrid mobile agents, providing a foundational platform for future advancements in creating more efficient and robust intelligent agents.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bolun Sun, Charles Chang Duke Kunshan University, Yuen Yuen Ang Johns Hopkins University, Ruotong Mu, Yuchen Xu, Zhengxin Zhang, Pingxu Hao
We introduce CAPC-CG, the Chinese Adaptive Policy Communication (Central Government) Corpus, the first open dataset of Chinese policy directives annotated with a five-color typology of policy signals, capturing clarity and ambiguity, grounded in the theory of adaptive policy communication. Spanning 1949–2023, this corpus includes laws, regulations, and rules issued by Chinese central authorities, segmented into 3.3 million paragraph units. We further propose and validate an expert-directed LLM annotation method that integrates codebook design, structured training, a two-step workflow, and LLM-based scaling. Alongside the corpus, we release metadata and a gold-standard labeled set developed by trained coders. Inter-annotator agreement achieves a Fleiss’ kappa of κ = 0.86 on directive labels, indicating high reliability. We provide baseline classification results with several large language models (LLMs), together with our codebook, and describe patterns from the data. This release enables downstream tasks and multilingual NLP research in communication strategies under complexity and uncertainty.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Speech codecs provide an important interface between continuous speech signals and large language models. An ideal codec for speech language models should not only preserve acoustic information but also capture rich semantic information. However, existing codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates. We propose \textbf{XY-Tokenizer}, a low-bitrate speech codec (around 1 kbps) trained with a structured multi-stage, multi-task strategy that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. This design explicitly mitigates the semantic–acoustic conflict observed in prior low-bitrate codecs. Experiments show that XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codecs such as SpeechTokenizer and Mimi, while maintaining high-quality speech reconstruction across both clean and out-of-distribution conditions. Furthermore, XY-Tokenizer consistently outperforms existing low-bitrate codecs in LLM-based speech understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness as a general-purpose speech representation for speech–language modeling.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jian Mu, Qixin Zhang Nanyang Technological University, Zhiyong Wang Chinese University of Hong Kong, Menglin Yang HKUST(GZ), Shuang Qiu City University of Hong Kong, Chengwei Qin The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Zhongxiang Dai The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yao Shu The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly solve complex reasoning tasks via long chain-of-thought, but their forward-only autoregressive generation process is fragile; early token errors can cascade, which creates a clear need for self-reflection mechanisms. However, existing self-reflection either performs revisions over full drafts or learns self-correction via expensive training, both fundamentally reactive and inefficient. To address this, we propose Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time (SRGen), a lightweight test-time framework that reflects before generating at uncertain points. During token generation, SRGen utilizes dynamic entropy thresholding to identify high-uncertainty tokens. For each identified token, it trains a specific corrective vector, which fully exploits the already generated context for a self-reflective generation to correct the token probability distribution. By retrospectively analyzing the partial output, this self-reflection enables more trustworthy decisions, thereby significantly reducing the probability of errors at highly uncertain points. Evaluated on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks and a diverse set of LLMs, SRGen can significantly strengthen model reasoning. Moreover, our findings position SRGen as a plug-and-play method that integrates reflection into the generation process for reliable LLM reasoning, achieving consistent gains with bounded overhead and can be combined with other training-time (e.g., RLHF) and test-time (e.g., SLOT) techniques.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
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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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sen Fang, Yalin Feng, Hongbin Zhong, Yanxin Zhang NVIDIA, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Sign Language Production (SLP) is the process of converting the complex input text into a real video. Most previous works focused on the Text2Gloss, Gloss2Pose, Pose2Vid stages, and some concentrated on Prompt2Gloss and Text2Avatar stages. However, this field has made slow progress due to the inaccuracy of text conversion, pose generation, and the rendering of poses into real human videos in these stages, resulting in gradually accumulating errors. Therefore, in this paper, we streamline the traditional redundant structure, simplify and optimize the task objective, and design a new sign language generative model called Stable Signer. It redefines the SLP task as a hierarchical generation end-to-end task that only includes text understanding (Prompt2Gloss, Text2Gloss) and Pose2Vid, and executes text understanding through our proposed new Sign Language Understanding Linker called SLUL, and generates hand gestures through the named SLP-MoE hand gesture rendering expert block to end-to-end generate high-quality and multi-style sign language videos. SLUL is trained using the newly developed Semantic-Aware Gloss Masking Loss (SAGM Loss). Its performance has improved by 48.6% compared to the current SOTA generation methods, which is a significant increase in the SLP field.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance—and in some cases, may even degrade it. This raises an important research question: how should we enhance the safety of LRMs? In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on how to enhance the safety of LRMs through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our investigation begins with an unexpected observation: directly distilling safe responses from DeepSeek-R1 fails to significantly enhance safety. We analyze this phenomenon and identify five key risky patterns that contribute to it. We then demonstrate that explicitly addressing these issues during the data distillation process can lead to substantial safety improvements. Next, we explore whether a long and complex reasoning process is necessary for achieving safety. Interestingly, we find that simply using short or template-based reasoning process can attain comparable safety performance. These findings prompt a deeper reflection on the role of reasoning in ensuring safety. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to reveal the impact of different training configurations. Overall, we hope our empirical study could provide a more holistic picture on enhancing the safety of LRMs.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表