Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of deleted training data without full retraining. In the sequential setting, deletion requests arrive over time, and repeated updates can accumulate approximation errors. In this paper, we study error accumulation in high dimensions, where parameter count $p$ is proportional to sample size $n$, for second-order unlearning methods under two privacy settings: (i) \emph{partial unlearning}, which allows unpublished internal states to be retained while certified versions of the model are released; and (ii) \emph{perfect unlearning}, which retains only published models and no hidden states. We also distinguish pointwise and pathwise certification, depending on whether the certification guarantee applies to each released model or the whole released sequence. We analyze conjugate gradient (CG) as an efficient solver for the inverse Hessian-vector product (IHVP) in Newton iterations. Our theory shows that a maximum of 1/2/2/3 Newton--CG updates suffice for successful certification and vanishing population-risk degradation of the published model, for pointwise partial, pathwise partial, pointwise perfect and pathwise perfect certification, respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate accurate sequential tracking and substantial computational gains of Newton-based methods combined with conjugate gradient, over gradient-based updates, especially for ill-conditioned problems.
He Du Fudan University, Bowen Li, Aijun Yang Shanghai Jiaotong University and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Siyang He, Qipeng Guo Shanghai AI Laboratory, Kai Chen Shanghai AI Laboratory, Dacheng Tao Nanyang Technological University
Reliable verifiable data has become a key driver of capability gains in modern language models, enabling stable reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and effective distillation that transfers competence across math, coding, and agentic tasks. Yet constructing generalizable synthetic verifiable data remains difficult due to hallucination-prone generation, and weak or trivial verification artifacts that fail to separate strong from weak solutions. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific heuristics or post-hoc filters that do not transfer across domains and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifiability. In this work, we introduce an evolutionary, task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that, from minimal seed supervision, jointly synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions, and verification artifacts, and iteratively discovers strategies via a consistency-based evaluator that enforces agreement between human-annotated and strategy-induced checks. This pipeline upgrades filtering into principled synthesis: it reliably assembles coherent, verifiable training instances and generalizes without domain-specific rules. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under both RLVR and model distillation training paradigms. The results show that training with our synthesized data yields significant improvements on both the LiveCodeBench and AgentBench-OS tasks, highlighting the robust generalization of our framework.
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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
Chunyu Qiang Tianjin University and Kuaishou- 快手科技, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin University of Science and Technology of China, Yuzhe Liang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yuxin Guo Tencent PCG and Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang 等 13 位作者
Generative audio modeling has largely been fragmented into specialized tasks, text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-music (TTM), and text-to-audio (TTA), each operating under heterogeneous control paradigms. Unifying these modalities remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic dissonance between structured semantic representations (speech/music) and unstructured acoustic textures (sound effects). In this paper, we introduce UniSonate, a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, and sound effects through a standardized, reference-free natural language instruction interface. To reconcile structural disparities, we propose a novel dynamic token injection mechanism that projects unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space, enabling precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT). Coupled with a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy, this approach effectively mitigates cross-modal optimization conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSonate achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and TTM (SongEval Coherence 3.18), while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. Crucially, we observe positive transfer, where joint training on diverse audio data significantly enhances structural coherence and prosodic expressiveness compared to single-task baselines.
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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
Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yushen Chen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Wenhanlin Huazhong University of Science and Technology 等 12 位作者
Speech codecs that convert continuous speech signals into discrete tokens have become essential for speech language models. However, existing codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks. In this work, we propose \textbf{SAC}, a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization. By disentangling semantic and acoustic modeling into two dedicated streams, SAC enables each to be optimized for its respective role. Comprehensive evaluations show that SAC achieves strong reconstruction performance across diverse bitrates under both clean and noisy conditions, with particularly high scores on UTMOS and WER, indicating superior naturalness and intelligibility. Moreover, SAC substantially surpasses prior codecs in semantic representation, approaching the level of continuous self-supervised embeddings. When used as a tokenizer for LLM-based text-to-speech, SAC enables a single-stage autoregressive (AR) TTS model that clearly outperforms state-of-the-art AR systems. Our disentanglement analysis further validates the effectiveness of the dual-stream design, offering new potential for controllable speech generation.
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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
Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen Shanghai Jiaotong University, Pan Zhou Huazhong University of Science and Technology 等 10 位作者
LLM-based agents are rapidly being deployed in real-world applications (e.g., digital assistants and customer service), making safety a critical concern. However, in multi-turn, tool-augmented settings, dynamic user interactions, external tool use, and unintended harmful behaviors make robust safety assurance challenging. To address these challenges, we propose SafeAgent, a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. SafeAgent introduces (1) an open and extensible threat model OTS that decomposes agent risk into instruction-, context-, and action-induced sources to ground safety analysis and alignment; and (2) an automated pipeline that instantiates OTS to surface scenario-specific failure modes, stress-test agents, and generate self-reflective safe responses—without hazardous real-world data collection. We evaluate SafeAgent on two safety benchmarks and one real-world terminal task. Across four widely used open-source models, SafeAgent improves safety performance by 45% on average and delivers a 28.91% gain on the real-world task, outperforming state-of-the-art closed-source models. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of SafeAgent in building safer LLM agents for real-world deployment.
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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
Yichuan Ma Fudan University, Linyang Li Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Yongkang Chen, Peiji Li, Xiaozhe Li, Qipeng Guo Shanghai AI Laboratory, Dahua Lin The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Kai Chen Shanghai AI Laboratory
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly tackle complex reasoning tasks, test-time scaling has become critical for enhancing capabilities. However, in agentic scenarios with frequent tool calls, the traditional generation-length-based definition breaks down: tool latency decouples inference time from generation length. We propose Timely Machine, redefining test-time as wall-clock time, where models dynamically adjust strategies based on time budgets. We introduce Timely-Eval, a benchmark spanning high-frequency tool calls, low-frequency tool calls, and time-constrained reasoning. By varying tool latency, we find smaller models excel with fast feedback through more interactions, while larger models dominate high-latency settings via superior interaction quality. Moreover, existing models fail to adapt reasoning to time budgets. We propose Timely-RL to address this gap. After cold-start supervised fine-tuning, we use reinforcement learning to enhance temporal planning. Timely-RL improves time budget awareness and consistently boosts performance across Timely-Eval. We hope our work offers a new perspective on test-time scaling for the agentic era.
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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
Yue Wang Soochow University, China, Ruotian Ma Tencent, Xingyu Chen Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao Tencent 等 17 位作者
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model’s ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by operationalism that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan – explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the orchestra, then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Tianyi Wang, Yixia Li, Long Li Infly Tech, Yibiao Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit assignment over long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) horizons and the prohibitive memory cost of the value model. While critic-free alternatives like GRPO mitigate these issues, they incur significant computational overhead by requiring multiple samples for baseline estimation, severely limiting training throughput. In this paper, we introduce Sequence-Level PPO (SPPO), a scalable algorithm that harmonizes the sample efficiency of PPO with the stability of outcome-based updates. SPPO reformulates the reasoning process as a Sequence-Level Contextual Bandit problem, employing a decoupled scalar value function to derive low-variance advantage signals without multi-sampling. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that SPPO significantly surpasses standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods, offering a resource-efficient framework for aligning reasoning LLMs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng Southern University of Science and Technology, Longyue Wang Alibaba Group, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Jinsong Su Xiamen University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong instruction-following and generalization abilities, enabled by expensive post-training pipelines. However, adapting them to specific downstream tasks remains challenging: direct fine-tuning often disrupts this delicate balance, while existing adapter-based transfer methods typically treat the instruction-tuned model as a passive target that only participates at the final merging stage. We propose GIFT (Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer), a simple and efficient framework that incorporates instruction-level guidance into task adaptation. GIFT fine-tunes a low-rank adapter on the pretrained base model using token-level confidence signals derived from the instruction-tuned model. The learned adapter is then merged into the instruction-tuned model, yielding task-specialized models that preserve general instruction-following behavior. We evaluate GIFT on mathematical reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks across multiple model families and scales. Results show that GIFT consistently outperforms direct fine-tuning and representative transfer-based baselines, while maintaining robust generalization and favorable test-time scaling behavior.
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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
Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang Research, Microsoft, Lingjie Jiang Peking University, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology 等 9 位作者
Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric, as scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of high-quality non-English image–text supervision. Although multilingual text data is abundant, naive textual fine-tuning can disrupt vision–language alignment and induce catastrophic forgetting. We propose Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. Specifically, we fine-tune a base LLM on multilingual text data to derive a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision-aligned task vector of an MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs across six multilingual multimodal benchmarks show consistent improvements while preserving both general multimodal and text-only capabilities. Moreover, VFA attains competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.
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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
Junyou Su, He Zhu, Xiao Luo University of Wisconsin - Madison, Liyu Zhang, Hong-Yu Zhou, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity: techniques optimized for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks, and vice versa. We observe that measuring contrastive entropy between base models and minimally instruction-tuned calibrated models reveals a pattern—samples with the lowest contrastive entropy consistently yield optimal performance across domains, yet this principle manifests domain-adaptively: reasoning tasks favor entropy increase (cognitive expansion), while general tasks favor entropy decrease (cognitive compression). We introduce InstructDiff, a unified framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropy-based ranking. Extensive experiments show that InstructDiff achieves 17% relative improvement over full data training on mathematical reasoning and 52% for general instruction-following, outperforming prior baselines while using only 10% of the data.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zeguan Xiao Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Siqing Li, Yong Wang, Xuetao Wei Southern University of Science and Technology, Jian Yang Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and forgetting is an auxiliary. From this perspective, we propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. Instantiating the framework, we adapt established PCGrad to resolve gradient conflicts, and introduce SAGO, a novel retention-prioritized gradient synthesis method. Theoretically, both variants ensure non-negative cosine similarity with the retain gradient, while SAGO achieves strictly tighter alignment through constructive sign-constrained synthesis. Empirically, on WMDP Bio/Cyber and RWKU benchmarks, SAGO consistently pushes the Pareto frontier: e.g., on WMDP Bio (SimNPO+GD), recovery of target model MMLU performance progresses from 44.6% (naive) to 94.0% (+PCGrad) and further to 96.0% (+SAGO), while maintaining comparable forgetting strength. Our results show that re-shaping gradient geometry, rather than re-balancing losses, is the key to mitigating unlearning-retention trade-offs.
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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