The rapid development of mobile imaging and social platforms has led to explosive growth in user-generated content images, making their systematic and comprehensive perceptual assessment increasingly important. Existing image perception benchmarks are typically task-oriented, curating specific scenarios for quality or aesthetic assessment and applying a uniform perceptual criterion across diverse scenarios. This limits their ability to capture the scene diversity and perceptual complexity of real-world UGC images. To address these limitations, we introduce ScenePercept-Bench, a benchmark designed to reflect the distribution of real-world UGC images, comprising 23,100 images across 21 categories and 105 fine-grained scenes. To account for the influence of scene context on human perception, we design a hierarchical, scene-aware annotation protocol, covering visual quality, aesthetic perception, and scene semantics, with 15 attributes in total. Each image is annotated with an overall score, 15 attribute-level scores, and structured explanatory reasoning. Building on this benchmark, we further introduce Scenario-Conditioned Perceptual Alignment, a training framework that tackles the heterogeneity of perceptual criteria across scenarios. SCPA jointly optimizes absolute score prediction, preference ranking, and cross-scenario calibration, preserving the model general perceptual assessment ability while encouraging it to explore and adapt perceptual criteria across different scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCPA achieves state-of-the-art performance in UGC image perception and generalizes effectively to established IQA and IAA benchmarks.
GLP-1 medications are increasingly used for weight management, and many people share their experiences online. These narratives show why people take the drugs and what they experience, but they remain unstructured and disconnected from formal pharmacovigilance. We therefore present AskGLP1, a system that transforms online patient narratives into a knowledge graph (KG) and answers questions about medication experiences. Through an LLM-assisted pipeline grounded in the MedDRA terminology, AskGLP1 screens nearly 8.5 million Reddit posts for medication experiences and distills 163,135 of them, with 2,506 WebMD reviews, into a KG of 385,790 drug-side-effect and drug-purpose relations. We find that GLP-1 experiences are source- and drug-specific. Online narratives share the most common gastrointestinal symptoms with FAERS, but they foreground everyday burdens such as fatigue and food aversion, whereas FAERS reports more often include injection-site reactions and selected serious diagnoses such as pancreatitis. We further find that posts report less nausea and vomiting for tirzepatide than for semaglutide, more fatigue for Wegovy than Ozempic and for Zepbound than Mounjaro. Evaluations show that the agent answers with verifiable evidence and declines requests for medical advice. Our findings reveal gaps between what FAERS captures and what people report online, and they call for patient-centered approaches to pharmacovigilance. Code, prompts, and evaluation questions are available at https://github.com/ZhaoqianXue/AskGLP1.
Debopam Sanyal, Hongjie Chen, Riya Elizabeth Kuriyan, Arth Tak, Divya Kothandaraman, Akshay Mehra, Joshua Kimball, Alexey Tumanov
Pretrained transformers spend a large share of their inference compute inside self-attention, yet the per-head query-key interaction is structurally low-rank by construction. We ask a diagnostic question: across layers and architectures, which heads actually use the full rank budget on real data, and which do not? We propose SVD-Attention, a post-hoc method that decomposes the per-head interaction matrix $M_h$ and scores every singular mode by both its spectral magnitude and its activation variance across tokens on a small calibration set. The score keeps the modes the head can amplify and that real data actually activates, and discards the rest; the resulting factorization is exact for the retained modes and needs no finetuning. Across seven pretrained models and five task types, the diagnostic finds a task-dependent pattern: redundancy sits in the early to middle layers for sentiment and image classification and for generation, and in the late layers for dense prediction and extractive question answering. It is also predictive: truncating the layers it flags costs at most $1.75$ F1, while truncating the same number of layers elsewhere in the same model costs up to $50$ F1. SVD-Attention is an analysis tool rather than a compression method: acting on it reduces inference FLOPs by $0.8$-$1.5\%$ on its own and by $8$-$11\%$ when composed with weight pruning, with $0$-$4\%$ change in task quality.
Huaiyu Jia, Jieshun You, Jingyu Liu, Yizhi Luo, Shuo Sun
Yield trading has emerged as a pivotal innovation in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) by decoupling principal from yield streams to enhance capital efficiency. Despite its significance, the field lacks fine-grained datasets for systematic empirical analysis. We address this gap by constructing the first large-scale benchmark dataset for Pendle, the pioneering on-chain interest rate derivatives protocol, spanning 24 months across 340 active markets with complete lifecycle observations. Our analysis reveals a structural market transition toward stablecoin-dominated "flight-to-quality" dynamics. To tackle the heavy-tailed nature of yield data, we propose Tail-MSE, an asymmetric loss function that prioritizes tail risk awareness through dynamic penalty weighting. Experiments across six state-of-the-art time series models demonstrate consistent improvements in volatility forecasting robustness, enabling the Tail-MSE Sniper strategy to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns in over half of all markets.
Recursive reasoning models such as the Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) iteratively refine two latent states: an answer state y, decoded into the output, and a reasoning state z, which is never decoded. Many of their failures have been attributed to bad basins, regions of latent space that trap the recursion on wrong answers. Recent test-time approaches perturb y, z or both to recover these failures, but the impact of this choice on performance, test-time compute efficiency and scaling properties remains unclear. Through controlled experiments on TRM, we find that a failed trajectory carries its failure in its answer state. At equal compute, whether retries continue a failed trajectory (depth scaling) or draw multiple trajectories from the initial states (width scaling), resampling y recovers more failures than any perturbation of z we tested, and the performance gap widens as the test-time compute budget grows. Our approach, Gated Answer Resampling (GAR), pairs this resampling of the answer state with the model's own halting head and restarts only the puzzles that the head rejects. With at most 64 restarts per puzzle and no training or hyperparameter search, GAR takes TRM from 85.9% to 99.4% on Sudoku-Extreme and from 68.8% to 85.6% on Pencil Puzzle Bench validation. On the same checkpoints, GAR also outperforms Probabilistic TRM (PTRM), which perturbs z at each step, even when PTRM uses 42 to 197 times as much compute. Our code is available at https://github.com/MaximeILL/GAR.
Learned policies for classical planning act without search, but each is tied to the domain it was trained on: network modules per action schema, parameters per predicate, or vocabulary-sized encodings mean a trained policy cannot even be executed on a new domain's predicates and action schemas. We present GADAR (Generalizing Across Domains via Action Ranking), a policy that takes the domain description as input, π(s, G, D), and constructs grounded actions in domains never seen in training, without search. Symbols are described by the roles they play in the domain rather than by their names, in three layers that each extend the previous one: (i) a lifted domain layer embeds D in every state graph through structural signatures; (ii) a binding layer ties each ground action's applicability to the lifted preconditions it instantiates; and (iii) a chain layer states which schema produces what another needs and how far each schema stands from the goal. The same network therefore runs on every domain, seen or unseen. We evaluate zero-shot generalization leave-one-domain-out over eight benchmark domains. A single GADAR policy trained on seven domains solves 58.3% of their test instances, one point below the 59.3% of dedicated single-domain GADAR models, so one policy serves many domains at no cost in coverage; a multi-task control that keeps symbol identity in its weights, while strong on some of the domains it trains on, transfers to none of the held-out ones. Zero-shot, GADAR executes on every held-out domain and exceeds random choice under the same executor on the large test instances of all eight: it solves 22.6% of them on average, against 3.3% for random choice and 0.6% for the same representation without the chain layer, and reaches 68% on held-out Visitall. Zero-shot coverage nonetheless remains well below in-domain coverage on most domains, and we analyze where it is weakest.
Natasha Ironside, Hongyu Kan, Kristofor Pas, Mohammad Shifat-E-Rabbi, Benjamin Newman, Shinjini Kundu, Kareem El Naamani, Tanvir Rizvi 等 20 位作者
Background The combination of hematoma location, expansion and final volume influence neurological outcome. The aim of this study was to derive and validate a quantitative and interpretable region-based NCCT image feature model for predicting hematoma expansion. Methods The Ethnic/Racial Variations of Intracerebral Hemorrhage(ERICH) study was used for derivation and the Virtual International Trials in Stroke Archive(VISTA) was used for validation. NCCT images at presentation and 24+/-6hours were pre-processed, segmented and categorized into lobar, basal ganglia or thalamic regions. Hematoma expansion was defined by region and according to its effect on clinical outcome. Transport-based morphometry (TBM) produced a unique transport-based representation from each NCCT hematoma image. Linear classifiers applied to transport representations were used to derive a predictive model. The regional TBM model's performance was compared to alternate methods using AUROC analyses. Results The derivation dataset included 574 patients, comprising 162 lobar, 257 basal ganglia and 155 thalamic hematomas. The validation dataset included 196 patients, comprising 31 lobar, 119 basal ganglia and 46 thalamic hematomas. A combined regional model predicted hematoma expansion in the validation dataset with an AUROC of 0.787. The principal image features which varied by location were size, heterogeneity, eccentricity and density distribution towards the hematoma periphery. The regional TBM model outperformed alternative clinician based and machine-learning methods. Conclusions TBM discriminated and visualized regional features of hematoma expansion from presentation NCCT scans. This provides preliminary evidence for regional radiographic features of hematoma expansion. It has the potential to improve hematoma expansion prediction and understanding of hematoma expansion pathophysiology.
Shu Zhou, K. Y. Michael Wong, Juntao Wang, David Shui Wing Hui, Daniel Ebler, Jie Sun
Recently proposed analog solvers based on dynamical systems, such as Ising machines, are promising platforms for large-scale combinatorial optimization. Yet, given the heuristic nature of the field, there is very limited insight on optimality guarantees of the solvers, as well as how parameter schedules shape dynamics and outcomes. Here, we develop a dynamical mean-field framework to analyze Ising-machine dynamics for finding the ground state energy of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick(SK) model of spin glasses and identify mechanisms that enable rapid convergence to provenly near-optimal energies. For a fixed target energy density Ec, we show that solutions are typically reached within O(1) matrix vector multiplications, indicating constant time complexity. We further delineate theoretical limitations arising from different parameter-scheduling trajectories and demonstrate a pronounced benefit of temperature-only annealing for the Coherent Ising Machine. Building on these insights, we propose a general framework for designing optimized parameter schedules, thereby improving the practical effectiveness of Ising machines for complex optimization tasks. The superior performance of the dynamical solvers is illustrated by the attainment of the ground state energy of the SK model.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) systems often suffer from missing modalities in real-world scenarios. Existing methods usually generate, align, or distill missing modalities as a whole, overlooking the heterogeneous nature of the information carried by each modality. Such holistic treatment mixes inferable shared semantics with uncertain modality-specific details, yielding unstable representations and degrading robustness. To address this issue, we propose the Primitive Memory Distillation (PriMD) framework. Unlike existing methods, PriMD takes an intra-modal perspective and focuses on how different types of information within a modality differ in recoverability. PriMD first disentangles cross-modal shared semantics from modality-specific representations, and then discretizes the latter into learnable semantic primitives to construct modality-specific memory banks. When modalities are missing, PriMD is a teacher-student framework that the student model uses the shared semantics of available modalities as queries to dynamically retrieve primitives. It compensates for missing modality-specific information within a constrained memory space and aligns with the teacher model. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate that PriMD achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently stronger robustness across a wide range of missing-modality settings, while mitigating the instability caused by holistic feature inference. Our code and project website are available at https://www.jiaqizhang-sengoku.com/Code/PriMD and https://www.jiaqizhang-sengoku.com/PriMD/ , respectively.
Timo Salomon, Mehmet Mueller, Philipp Meyer, Thomas C. Schmidt
The automotive industry trends to softwarizing cars according to flexible, service-oriented architectures. At the same time, connected cars become networked computer systems but lack proper security measures. In this paper, we propose to authenticate and authorize in-vehicle services by integrating DNSSEC, DANE, and DANCE with automotive middleware. Our approach decouples the cryptographic authentication of the service from that of the service deployment with the help of DNSSEC and thereby largely simplifies key management. We propose to authenticate in-vehicle services by certificates that are solely generated by the service suppliers but published on deployment via DNSSEC TLSA records solely signed by the OEM. We further show how these established Internet standards secure the service discovery and invocation, ensure interoperability with various protocols, and scale management of credentials for millions of connected vehicles at robust security levels. We back our design proposal by a security analysis using the STRIDE threat model and by evaluations in an emulation of a realistic in-vehicle setup that demonstrate its effectiveness.
Jia Wang, Yuqing Li, Jiangnan Li, Zheng Lin, Mo Yu
Locating relevant evidence in long inputs is a core capability of Multimodal Large Language Models. Prior studies attribute this capability to retrieval heads, a sparse set of attention heads that transfer information from the context to the output. However, these analyses are confined to a limited set of modalities and the corresponding models. Moreover, how retrieval heads can be leveraged to enhance the model calls for further exploration. In this paper, we ask whether this mechanism expands together with the input modalities of the model. Taking audio-visual input as a newly added modality, we construct paired inputs in which the same answer is either spoken or shown on screen. With the evidence content fixed, retrieval heads remain sparse in the new modality and are shared to a large extent across modalities. Across 18 language, vision-language, and omni-modal checkpoints, omni-modal models largely preserve the retrieval heads of their backbones. Ablating these heads eliminates nearly all audio-visual retrieval. The heads shared across modalities make up fewer than 2\% of all heads, yet ablating them also degrades document understanding, spatial perception, and visual mathematics. Building on these findings, we turn retrieval heads into a target of optimization by training their attention with a ranking objective. This raises the page Recall@1 of Qwen3-VL-8B on MMDocIR by 6.03 points and improves document retrieval across three model families. Functional attention heads can thus serve both as a lens on multimodal models and as a target for improving them.
Vishal Sankar Ram, Jason Kushner, Manas Paldhe, Youngseo Son
Administrative tasks in the healthcare domain share linguistic commonalities, but it can be time-consuming to manually design LLM prompts for each use case. When calling health insurers, interactive voice response (IVR) systems cause delays in patient care and increase provider burnout due to complex routing and long hold times. Thus, IVR navigation models can offer significant time savings and reduce barriers to care. We propose a production-quality automated LLM pipeline which leverages a small number of human-labeled ground truth datasets to transfer specialized prompts from one task to another; specifically, we perform a cross-task transfer of our IVR navigation logic, adapting the prompt from reaching the claims department to reaching the patient benefit department. Our approach reduces prompt complexity by up to 80% and obtains 82% turn-level accuracy in real-world industrial healthcare settings, surpassing a human-designed prompt at 79%.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jian Gao, Richeng Xuan Tencent, Zhaolu Kang, Dingshi Liao, Wenxin Huang, Zongmou Huang, Yangdi Xu, Bowen Qin Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence 等 12 位作者
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has not been matched by their evaluation in low-resource languages, especially Southeast Asian languages like Lao. To fill this gap, we introduce LaoBench, the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. LaoBench contains 17,000+ expert-curated samples across three dimensions: culturally grounded knowledge application, curriculum-aligned K12 education, and bilingual translation among Lao, Chinese, and English. It includes open-source and held-out subsets, where the held-out portion enables secure black-box evaluation via a controlled service to improve fairness and data security. We construct LaoBench with a hybrid pipeline that combines expert authoring with agent-assisted verification, ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural relevance, and educational validity. We evaluate diverse state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source LLMs, and find that even strong multilingual models lag behind human experts, particularly in culturally grounded reasoning and translation fidelity. We hope LaoBench will catalyze research on Lao and other underrepresented Southeast Asian languages for more inclusive multilingual evaluation.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jiujiang Guo, Zhengliang Guo, Kai Wang, Meiyang Wang Hebei University of Science and Technology, Dehua Peng, Shaozu Yuan, Chengyin Hu, Shuan Ai Jilin Business and Technology College 等 9 位作者
Existing knowledge graph completion research is gradually shifting from representing logical semantics of static facts to modeling evolving semantics of temporal facts, yet lacks collaborative modeling of both within a unified framework. To this end, we use concept of snapshots to decompose fact features into two complementary mechanisms: (a) intra-snapshot semantic coupling, where entities and relations exhibit snapshot-specific meanings through multidimensional interactions; (b) trans-snapshot evolutionary synergy, where relations between entities evolve across snapshots and manifest varying states. These snapshot mechanisms jointly reveal underlying logic of facts. To track them, we propose TeCES, a framework for high-fidelity modeling of evolving snapshots. TeCES embeds facts into a 2-grade geometric algebra (GA) system to capture complex semantics via multilevel structures. Temporal information is attached to each entity for mapping into snapshot spaces, while relations and timestamps are reconfigured into composite GA representations. Geometric products enable multidimensional interactions, revealing relation state changes over time. Lastly, the head entity at each snapshot combines with fused temporal-relational representation via geometric product to approximate the target tail entity at multiple levels. Overall, TeCES supports joint modeling of evolving snapshots within a lightweight GA system and significantly outperforms SOTA models on six benchmarks.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xianda Zheng University of Auckland, Zijian Huang University of Auckland, Meng-Fen Chiang, Jiamou Liu The University of Auckland, Yuan Fang Singapore Management University, Michael J. Witbrock University of Auckland, Kaiqi Zhao Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
Explicit knowledge conflicts, where retrieved contexts contain contradictory information, have become increasingly prevalent as Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate diverse data sources. The core challenge lies in the complexity of entangled narratives and the heterogeneity of conflict cases, which impose excessive demands on the reasoning capabilities of standard models. To address this, we propose Knowledge Conflict Reasoning (KCR), a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic. KCR first disentangles conflicting contexts into distinct sets of reasoning traces, utilizing both textual and graph-based representations, to simplify comprehension. It then employs a Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) paradigm, guiding the model to internalize a reasoning process that maximizes logical consistency while actively suppressing spurious reasoning paths derived from contradictory contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KCR yields substantial improvements: a KCR-enhanced 7B model surpasses the performance of baselines equipped with top-tier closed-source models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5.1.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Lukas Helff Technische Universität Darmstadt, Ahmad Omar, Felix Friedrich, Antonia Wüst Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hikaru Shindo SB Intuitions, Rupert Mitchell Technische Universität Darmstadt, Tim Woydt, Patrick Schramowski German Research Center for AI 等 10 位作者
We introduce SLR, an end-to-end framework for systematic evaluation and training of Large Language Models (LLMs) via Scalable Logical Reasoning. Given a user’s task specification, SLR automatically synthesizes (i) an instruction prompt for an inductive reasoning task, (ii) a validation program, executable on model outputs to provide verifiable rewards, and (iii) the latent ground-truth rule. This process is fully automated, scalable, requires no human annotations, and offers precise control over task difficulty. Using SLR, we create SLR-Bench, a benchmark comprising 19k prompts organized into 20 curriculum levels that progressively increase in relational, arithmetic, and recursive complexity. Large-scale evaluation reveals that contemporary LLMs readily produce syntactically valid rules, yet often fail at correct logical inference. Recent reasoning LLMs demonstrate improved performance but incur very high test-time computation, with costs exceeding 300 for just 1,000 prompts. Finally, curriculum learning via SLR doubles Llama-3-8B accuracy on SLR-Bench, achieving parity with Gemini-Flash-Thinking at a fraction of computational cost. Moreover, these reasoning capabilities generalize to a wide range of established benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness of SLR for downstream reasoning.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiaoyuan Wu Carnegie Mellon University, Roshni Kaushik Fujitsu Research and Development Center Co. Ltm., Wenkai Li Fujitsu Research and Development Center Co. Ltm., Lujo Bauer Carnegie Mellon University, Koichi Onoue
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted for tasks like draftingemails, summarizing meetings, and answering health questions. In thesesettings, users may need to share private information (e.g., contactdetails, health records). To evaluate LLMs’ ability to identify and redactsuch information, prior work introduced real-life, scenario-based benchmarks(e.g., ConfAIde, PrivacyLens) and found that LLMs can leak privateinformation in complex scenarios. However, these evaluations relied on proxy LLMs to judge the helpfulnessand privacy-preservation quality of LLM responses, rather than directlymeasuring users’ perceptions. To understand how users perceive the helpfulness and privacy-preservationquality of LLM responses to privacy-sensitive scenarios, we conducted auser study (n=94) using 90 PrivacyLens scenarios. We found that users hadlow agreement with each other when evaluating identical LLM responses. Incontrast, five proxy LLMs reached high agreement, yet each proxy LLM hadlow correlation with users’ evaluations. These results indicate that proxy LLMs cannot accurately estimate users’ wide range of perceptions of utility and privacy inprivacy-sensitive scenarios. We discuss the need for more user-centeredstudies to measure LLMs’ ability to help users while preserving privacy,and for improving alignment between LLMs and users in estimating perceivedprivacy and utility.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Adrián Gude Universidad de La Coruña, Roi Santos-Rios, Francis Bond Palacký University Olomouc, Dan Flickinger, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez Universidade da Coruña, Olga Zamaraeva Universidad de La Coruña
This study contributes to a growing line of research in comparing LLM-generated texts with human-authored text, in this case, English news text. We focus in particular on the evaluation of syntactic properties through formal grammar frameworks. Our analysis compares two generations of LLMs in the context of two human-authored English news datasets from two different years. Employing the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) formalism, we investigate the distributions of syntactic structures and lexical types of AI-generated texts and contrast them with the corresponding distributions in the human-authored New Your Times (NYT) articles. We use diversity metrics from ecology and information theory to quantify variation in grammatical constructions and lexical types. Our results show that, while English news text has changed little in the given time frame, newer, instruction-tuned LLMs display reduced syntactic and, especially, lexical diversity compared to older, non-instruction-tuned models. These findings point to future work in studying effects of instruction tuning, which, while enhancing coherence and adherence to prompts, may narrow the expressive range of model output.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Viktoriia A. Chekalina FusionBrain Lab, Gerasin Timofey Independent, Andrey Kuznetsov Innopolis University and FusionBrain Lab, Evgeny Frolov Higher School of Economics, Higher School of Economics and AXXX
Quantization has shown strong results in preserving model quality under compression. However, under aggressive bit-width reductions, even quantization may require additional information to prevent performance degradation. A natural source of it is second-order curvature information, captured by the Hessian. Since the Hessian of the model layers is prohibitively large, direct computation is infeasible, making structured parameterizations and approximations crucial in practice.In this work, we propose efficient Kronecker-factored approximation yielding state-of-the-art performance when integrated into existing quantization schemes. Evaluations on the LLaMA and Qwen model families show near-baseline quality at 4-bit compression and only a 5–6% degradation at 2-bit. Moreover, our method substantially accelerates the most expensive component in second-order quantization – Hessian parameterization – achieving up to a 10× speedup over prior approaches.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Abbas Ghaddar Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd., Ivan Kobyzev Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Boxing Chen Huawei Technologies Ltd., Yufei Cui
Post-training hybridization of large language models (LLMs) often replaces quadratic self-attention with sliding-window attention (SWA) to reduce KV cache usage and improve latency. Existing hybridization schemes are typically defined either at the layer level (e.g., interleaving) or at the head level via static rankings from local to global. Layer-level schemes ignore that local and global dependencies are routed through heads within the same layer, while static head-level rankings suffer from entanglement: a head’s local/global behavior can change after hybridization. We propose BOSCH, Black-box Binary Optimization for Short-context Head Selection, a training-free method that formulates the problem as a Large Neighborhood Search and decomposes it into three subproblems: (i) layer-importance detection via small-budget black-box probes, (ii) adaptive per-layer SWA-ratio assignment based on these sensitivities, and (iii) grouped head-level optimization within ratio buckets. Extensive experiments on 4 LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 30B parameters, across 4 SWA ratios, show that BOSCH consistently outperforms layer-level heuristics and 6 strong static head-level methods, with larger gains at higher SWA ratios. Under continual pretraining, BOSCH recover original long-context performance faster and to a higher level. Analysis of the selected heads reveals substantial turnover for BOSCH across different SWA ratios, underscoring the importance of performing head-level selection for each target ratio rather than relying on fixed locality rankings.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Alessandro Corona Mendozza, Anders Søgaard Copenhagen University
We investigate belief-like representations in decoder-only autoregressive LLMs using linear controlled probes on residual stream activations and single attention heads. Following Herrmann and Levinstein’s (2025) criteria (Accuracy, Use, Coherence, and Uniformity) we find that large models exhibit strong truth sensitivity (Accuracy), and steering activations along probe directions reliably changes downstream behavior (Use). Coherence, measured via calibrated probes and cross-dataset probing, is moderate across models, while training on diverse data yields domain-consistent truth directions (Uniformity). The results are particularly encouraging at the head level and align with some standard philosophical accounts of belief, e.g., minimal functionalism, supporting the view that LLMs can maintain propositional attitudes under such theoretical frameworks.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sibo Xiao, Fu Jinyuan, Zhongle Xie Zhejiang University, Lidan Shou Zhejiang University
Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) has been a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) substantially improves LLM inference efficiency. However, its utility is limited by a fundamental constraint: the draft and target models must share the same vocabulary, thus limiting the herd of available draft models and often necessitating the training of a new model from scratch. Inspired by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), a classic algorithm for aligning time series, we propose the algorithm TokenTiming for universal speculative decoding. It operates by re-encoding the draft token sequence to get a new target token sequence, and then uses DTW to build a mapping to transfer the probability distributions for speculative sampling. Benefiting from this, our method accommodates mismatched vocabularies and works with any off-the-shelf models without retraining and modification. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various tasks, demonstrating 1.57x speedup. This work enables a universal approach for draft model selection, making SD a more versatile and practical tool for LLM acceleration.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zihan Wu, Jie Xu, Yun Peng The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chun Yong Chong Monash University Malaysia, Xiaohua Jia
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to automate real-world vulnerability detection due to two key limitations: the heterogeneity of vulnerability patterns undermines the effectiveness of a single unified model, and manual prompt engineering for massive weakness categories is unscalable.To address these challenges, we propose MulVul, a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework designed for precise and broad-coverage vulnerability detection. MulVul adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy: a Router agent first predicts the top- coarse categories and then forwards the input to specialized Detector agents, which identify the exact vulnerability types. Both agents use evidence retrieved from vulnerability knowledge bases to mitigate hallucinations. Crucially, to automate the generation of specialized prompts, we design Cross-Model Prompt Evolution, a prompt optimization mechanism where a generator LLM iteratively refines candidate prompts while a distinct executor LLM validates their effectiveness. This decoupling mitigates the self-correction bias inherent in single-model optimization. Evaluated on 130 CWE types, MulVul achieves 34.79% Macro-F1, outperforming the best baseline by 41.5%. Ablation studies validate cross-model prompt evolution, which boosts performance by 51.6% over manual prompts by effectively handling diverse vulnerability patterns.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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
Zhihao Xu, Fuzhen Yang, Liang Lin, Xiting Wang Renmin University of China
Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have showcased strong performance across various reasoning tasks by leveraging System-2 thinking capabilities. However, existing studies indicate that this reasoning ability alone does not reliably transfer to the general alignment domain. Inspired by cognitive science and how humans solve tasks, we argue that LRMs must be equipped with metacognitive knowledge to fully utilize their System-2 capabilities. In this paper, we propose Priority-Aware Metacognition (PAM), which guides the model to first identify the top-level human preference (e.g., harmlessness) as a means of understanding the alignment task’s nature, and then apply other kinds of metacognitive knowledge to better monitor and regulate the model’s thinking process. We implement PAM via a two-stage pipeline: a cold-start phase that collects structured metacognitive knowledge based on Flavell’s theoretical framework, and a preference-optimization phase that further reinforces such metacognition. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PAM. Under the same training pipelines, PAM consistently yields higher performance, improving general domain alignment performance by ~10 points on the helpfulness and harmless benchmarks. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PAM-RM-02DF.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Sikuan Yan Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Huawei Technologies Ltd., Xiufeng Yang, Zuchao Huang, Ercong Nie Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zifeng Ding, Zonggen Li University of Hong Kong, Xiaowen Ma, Jinhe Bi 等 13 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of NLP tasks, but they remain fundamentally stateless, constrained by limited context windows that hinder long-horizon reasoning. Recent efforts to address this limitation often augment LLMs with an external memory bank, yet most existing pipelines are static and heuristic-driven, lacking a learned mechanism for deciding what to store, update, or retrieve. We present Memory-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that equips LLMs with the ability to actively manage and utilize external memory through two specialized agents: a Memory Manager that learns structured operations, including ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, and NOOP; and an Answer Agent that pre-selects and reasons over relevant entries. Both agents are fine-tuned with outcome-driven RL (PPO and GRPO), enabling adaptive memory management with minimal supervision. With only 152 training QA pairs, Memory-R1 outperforms strong baselines and generalizes across diverse question types, three benchmarks (LoCoMo, MSC, LongMemEval), and multiple model scales (3B–14B).
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bowen Zeng, Feiyang Ren, Jun Zhang Qwen, Xiaoling Gu Hangzhou Dianzi University, Ke Chen Zhejiang University, Lidan Shou Zhejiang University, Huan Li Zhejiang University
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key–value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens, causing caches to scale linearly with context length and remain resident in GPU memory throughout decoding, which leads to prohibitive memory overhead and latency even on high-end GPUs. A common solution is to compress caches under a fixed allocated budget at different granularities: token-level uniformly discards less important tokens, layer-level varies retention across layers, and head-level redistributes budgets across heads. Yet these approaches stop at allocation and overlook the heterogeneous behaviors of attention heads that require distinct compression strategies. We propose HybridKV, a hybrid KV cache compression framework that integrates complementary strategies in three stages: heads are first classified into static or dynamic types using text-centric attention; then a top-down budget allocation scheme hierarchically assigns KV budgets; finally, static heads are compressed by text-prior pruning and dynamic heads by chunk-wise retrieval. Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks with Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that HybridKV reduces KV cache memory by up to 7.9\times and achieves 1.52\times faster decoding, with almost no performance drop or even higher relative to the full-cache MLLM.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
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
LLMs have static pre-trained knowledge, leading to obsolescence and hallucinations. Knowledge Editing (KE) addresses these issues and typically requires multi-layer modifications. However, existing state-of-the-art methods, largely following the Locate–Select–Assign–Edit (LSAE) paradigm, rely on fixed-layer selection and uniform residual assignment, ignoring the heterogeneous causal efficacy of different layers. To bridge this, we propose \textbf{CAKE} (\textbf{C}ausal-Guided \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{E}diting), a collaborative editing method within the more general Locate–Weight–Assign–Edit (LWAE) paradigm that: (1) selectively identifies critical layers via causal tracing scores; and (2) adaptively allocates editing burdens based on causal weights rather than uniform assumptions. We formulate residual assignment as a constrained quadratic optimization problem and derive a solution for optimal residual allocation, showing that aligning edits with causal efficacy mitigates recursive error accumulation. Furthermore, we establish a generalized weight shift error bound, under which existing paradigms emerge as special, restricted cases. Experimental results demonstrate that CAKE achieves SOTA performance with comparable overhead, validating the superiority of causal-guided adaptation.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Large language model (LLM) agents that invoke external tools must make sequences of interdependent decisions, yet existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods treat each step in isolation, ignoring how confidence evolves and compounds across a full task trajectory.We propose a framework for trajectory-level confidence analysis in the tool-use agent setting. The thesis pursues three aims: (1) estimating action-level confidence by adapting step-wise UQ to the heterogeneous think-act-observe cycles of tool-using agents; (2) aggregating the diverse action space into semantically coherent action types to enable meaningful trajectory-level analysis; and (3) discovering temporal patterns in the resulting confidence trajectories that reliably predict task success or failure.We ground the work in standard tool-use benchmarks and expect the framework to expose early warning signals for agent failure and offer interpretable diagnostic tools for understanding when and why LLM agents lose confidence, with improved calibration of multi-step agentic pipelines as a secondary benefit.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) · 2026 · 正式发表
Rory Sayres, Kejia Chen, Ayush Jain, Matthew Thompson, Jonathan Richina, Xiang Yin, Jimmy Hu, Fan Zhang 等 22 位作者
Patient-managed Personal Health Records (PHRs) promises to empower patients to better understand their health; but information in the record is complex, potentially hindering insights. In this study, we assess the potential of large language models (LLMs, Gemini 3.0 Flash) to provide helpful answers to user health queries, when provided clinical data from PHRs as context. A total of 2,257 user queries were drawn from 3 different distributions to represent patient questions: shorter web search queries, longer questions derived from templates of chatbot conversations, and questions patients asked to their healthcare team (patient calls). Queries were matched with de-identified PHRs (from a pool of 1,945). Gemini responses were generated (1) without PHR context; (2) with a basic summary of demographics, conditions, and medications; (3) with full, extensive clinical notes. For evaluation, we leveraged an existing rating framework (SHARP), and developed a new framework for specific error modes when interpreting PHRs. Evaluation was performed using autoraters for the full set, and with clinician ratings for a subset (n=95), with both sets of raters knowing the full PHR context. We see significant improvements in the helpfulness of answers to all question types with PHR data (p < 0.001, paired t-test). We also observe potential gains in safety, accuracy, relevance and personalization of answers. Our PHR evaluation framework further identifies gaps in LLM understanding of particular aspects of complex PHRs, such as temporal disorientation, and rare but meaningful confabulations. These results suggest potential for PHR data to help people with a wide range of user needs; and provide a framework for monitoring for gaps in LLM answers based on PHR context. This study motivates further work to assess and realize potential benefits to users from understanding their health records.
AI 速览：提出人口动态基础模型（PDFM），通过图神经网络融合多源地理数据生成嵌入，在27个地理空间任务上取得领先表现。
Supporting the health and well-being of dynamic populations around the world requires governmental agencies, organizations and researchers to understand and reason over complex relationships between human behavior and local contexts in order to identify high-risk groups and strategically allocate limited resources. Traditional approaches to these classes of problems often entail developing manually curated, task-specific features and models to represent human behavior and the natural and built environment, which can be challenging to adapt to new, or even, related tasks. To address this, we introduce a Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) that aims to capture the relationships between diverse data modalities and is applicable to a broad range of geospatial tasks. We first construct a geo-indexed dataset for postal codes and counties across the United States, capturing rich aggregated information on human behavior from maps, busyness, and aggregated search trends, and environmental factors such as weather and air quality. We then model this data and the complex relationships between locations using a graph neural network, producing embeddings that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks using relatively simple models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by benchmarking it on 27 downstream tasks spanning three distinct domains: health indicators, socioeconomic factors, and environmental measurements. The approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 27 geospatial interpolation tasks, and on 25 out of the 27 extrapolation and super-resolution tasks. We combined the PDFM with a state-of-the-art forecasting foundation model, TimesFM, to predict unemployment and poverty, achieving performance that surpasses fully supervised forecasting. The full set of embeddings and sample code are publicly available for researchers.