Yaxin Xiao, Yulin Jin, Li Tang, Haoyang LI, Huadi Zheng, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu
Machine unlearning aims to erase the influence of a designated forget set from a trained model while preserving strong utility on the retain set. Approximate unlearning methods efficiently achieve this goal without full retraining, but their effectiveness is primarily assessed using dataset-level aggregate metrics. These aggregate metrics can mask deviations from retraining at the level of individual samples. In this work, we focus on per-sample unlearning effectiveness. We introduce SALA (Sample-grained Likelihoods ALignment), a plug-in optimization framework that enables approximate unlearning methods to operate at the level of individual samples by steering each example toward its correct target distribution. To quantitatively assess this behavior, we further propose the sample-grained distribution gap, a metric that captures per-sample discrepancies between approximate unlearning and exact retraining output distributions. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that SALA contracts this gap and yields a bounded per-sample discrepancy to retraining. To make this framework practical, we develop a low-cost estimation method for the member and non-member target distributions. Extensive experiments on classification and generation tasks demonstrate that SALA reduces the sample-grained distribution gap by up to $86.67\%$ when paired with existing approximate unlearning baselines, while also improving robustness to unlearning hyperparameters.
Adapting step-distilled text-to-image (T2I) models through post-training incurs additional computational costs and affects native few-step generation behavior. This motivates a complementary route beyond style-specific adaptation: drawing on the visual knowledge already encoded in step-distilled T2I models to elicit stylistic capabilities through language. Pursuing this direction requires textual guidance that captures how visual attributes jointly define a style and remain applicable as the depicted content changes. To explore this approach, we introduce StyleForge, a fully automatic, training-free framework that expresses reference styles as reusable rendering instructions. By integrating overall rendering characteristics with local color and lighting behavior, StyleForge organizes visual evidence from reference images into a coherent specification of how the target style should be expressed. The specification is then compiled into textual guidance that can be reused across content prompts, enabling frozen step-distilled T2I models to render different subjects and scenes in the reference style while retaining native few-step generation. Extensive experiments show relative gains of up to 29.47\% in generation quality scores over the strongest baseline, while Pareto analysis indicates that improved stylization is accompanied by strong adherence to the requested content. Code is available at https://github.com/sunshy-1/StyleForge.
Humanoid controllers need the ability to yield to external forces while retaining the capacity to resume their original tasks. However, tracking objectives penalize the deviations needed for yielding, while relaxing tracking goals persistently can make task recovery harder. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific interaction command interfaces or constructed compliant motion data and reference trajectories, limiting the direct reuse of their compliance-training mechanisms across different task interfaces. We introduce CompliantBot, a compliance-training framework for motion tracking and velocity-command locomotion. It preserves the original task inputs and requires no preconstructed compliant data or target trajectories. A state-dependent interaction force field couples applied loads to the robot's motion, enabling local articulation and whole-body movement to change the forces experienced. A complementary force-magnitude reward encourages lower interaction loads, while task rewards are downweighted during loading and restored after release to coordinate yielding and task resumption. The trained policies use task inputs and proprioceptive history without explicit external-force measurements. Across both task interfaces, CompliantBot yields farther under constant pulls and experiences lower spring interaction loads than matched baselines, while resuming task tracking after force removal. CompliantBot achieves the highest task completion among the compared methods under stronger pulls. Power evaluations further show that CompliantBot has the lowest mean joint mechanical power among the compared methods. Real-robot demonstrations further illustrate compliant responses through arm motion, stepping, and body reorientation.
Long-context multimodal document question answering (QA) has become an important yet challenging task for modern vision-language models (VLMs), as it requires reasoning over evidence dispersed across pages and modalities within limited input budgets. Current pipelines adopt retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to select multimodal evidence for downstream VLMs. However, existing systems mainly rely on static selection rules over fixed-granularity retrieval units such as pages or blocks, resulting in information loss during retrieval and suboptimal performance in downstream reasoning. To alleviate these issues, we formulate the core task as budget-aware evidence selection over structured document evidence and propose HyperDoc, a document RAG framework that constructs compact yet sufficient evidence while preserving document relations. Specifically, HyperDoc constructs a document hypergraph to explicitly capture structural, logical, and cross-modal relationships among multimodal document elements. Over this structured evidence space, HyperDoc performs adaptive cost-aware hyperedge selection based on query intent and input budget. Extensive experiments on three representative benchmarks demonstrate that HyperDoc outperforms various types of state-of-the-art baselines.
Agent Skills allow LLM agents to combine reusable capabilities, but checking each Skill in isolation cannot rule out policy violations when they are composed. We term such failures Conflict of Skills (CoS): artifacts or assessment signals produced for one purpose may be reused downstream without preserving the restrictions or authorization needed for their new use. Using controlled executions of publicly available Skills and matched single-Skill controls, we identify four recurring mechanisms behind CoS. Building on these findings, we introduce the Conflict of Skills Attack (CoSA), which adds locally admitted Skills to an existing pool to supply missing business operations (capability supplementation) or reshape artifact exchange, decision reuse, and target/action bindings (relationship reshaping). CoSA leaves existing Skills and runtime permissions unchanged. To evaluate this threat under autonomous Skill selection, we introduce CoSA-Bench, built from real-world Skills and controlled services, with 288 tasks across recruiting, finance, IT, and business, covering data leakage, unauthorized state modification, and unsafe execution. Across five LLMs and three agent harnesses, additions capped at 5% of each original pool raise the policy-violation rate from 35.02% to 58.45%, an increase of 23.43 percentage points. Trace analysis links compliant-to-violating transitions to cross-Skill dependencies involving the additions. Finally, we develop a lightweight harness-level guard that checks information flow and authorization before consequential actions. On OpenClaw recruiting tasks across five models, the guard reduces violations from 65.28% to 6.67%, while policy-compliant task completion on matched benign controls changes from 66.67% to 65.00%.
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin national university of singaore, National University of Singapore, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Shanghai AI Laboratory, Qiushi Sun University of Hong Kong, Zehao Li University of Science and Technology of China, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu 等 15 位作者
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), current agentic frameworks struggle with robustness in novel domains and long-horizon workflows due to the absence of visual-aware tutorial retrieval and the lack of granular control over historical visual context curation and pruning. To bridge these gaps, we introduce OS-Symphony, a holistic framework that comprises an Orchestrator coordinating two key innovations for robust automation: (1) a Reflection-Memory Agent that utilizes milestone-driven long-term memory to enable trajectory-level self-correction, effectively mitigating visual context loss in long-horizon tasks; (2) Versatile Tool Agents featuring a Multimodal Searcher that adopts a “SeeAct” paradigm to navigate a browser-based sandbox to synthesize live, visually aligned tutorials, thereby resolving fidelity issues in unseen scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across varying model scales, establishing new state-of-the-art results on three online benchmarks, notably achieving 65.84% on OSWorld. All research assets will be made publicly available.
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cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qiuyuan Ai, Zenghuang Fu, Zhaoyang Li, Ping Jiang Peking University, Haoyu Wu Mininglamp.com, Jie Song Peking University, Guannan He Peking University
Scaling LLM-based agents to long-horizon deep research is constrained by the context-noise trade-off, where linear history accumulation degrades reasoning and dilutes fine-grained evidence. To address this, we introduce the Cognitive Scaffold, a factorized memory architecture that decouples the cognitive state into a Fluid Working Context for immediate reasoning and a persistent Knowledge Graph for long-term retention. Unlike unstructured summarization, our framework employs a Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) pipeline to crystallize saturated context into structured event snapshots, strictly enforcing atomic constraints to preserve numerical values and entities. During reasoning, a thought-driven dual-path retrieval mechanism enables the agent to proactively recover precise evidence. Empirical evaluations on Xbench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp-ZH, and GAIA demonstrate that Cognitive Scaffold consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 74.7% Avg@3 and 87.0% Pass@3 on Xbench-DeepSearch, 48.5% Avg@3 and 65.9% Pass@3 on BrowseComp-ZH, and 72.8% Avg@3 and 88.3% Pass@3 on GAIA, while reducing compression hallucinations to 5.3%. We open-source our codebase to facilitate future 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
Yuqin Yang, Haowu Zhou South China University of Technology, Haoran Tu, Zhiwen Hui, Shiqi Yan South China University of Technology, HaoYang Li, Dong She South China University of Technology, Xianrong Yao 等 10 位作者
Most affective computing research treats emotion as a static property of text, focusing on the writer’s sentiment while overlooking the reader’s perspective. This approach ignores how individual personalities lead to diverse emotional appraisals of the same event. Although role-playing Large Language Models (LLMs) attempt to simulate such nuanced reactions, they often suffer from "personality illusion”—relying on surface-level stereotypes rather than authentic cognitive logic. A critical bottleneck is the absence of ground-truth human data to link personality traits to emotional shifts. To bridge the gap, we introduce Persona-E² (Persona-Event2Emotion), a large-scale dataset grounded in annotated MBTI and Big Five traits to capture reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives. Extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to capture precise appraisal shifts, particularly in social media domains. Crucially, we find that personality information significantly improves comprehension, with the Big Five traits alleviating "personality illusion.’
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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
Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo State University of New York at Stony Brook, Jiarui Yu Tencent, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang 等 9 位作者
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) serves as a cornerstone technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its training is often plagued by entropy collapse, a rapid decline in policy entropy that limits exploration and undermines training effectiveness. While recent works attempt to mitigate this issue via several heuristic entropy interventions, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses of entropy dynamics in RLVR, offering two main insights: (1) We derive a tight approximation for token-level entropy change at each update step, revealing four governing factors and providing a unified theoretical framework of how existing methods influence entropy; (2) We reveal a fundamental limitation of recent approaches: they rely on heuristic adjustments to one or two of these factors, leaving other relevant factors unconsidered, thus inherently limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by these findings, we propose STEER, a principled entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropy variations. Extensive experiments across six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks demonstrate that STEER effectively mitigates entropy collapse and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
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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
Ziyou Jiang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mingyang Li Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Junjie Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuekai Huang, Jie Huang, Zhiyuan Chang, Zhaoyang Li, Qing Wang
Harmful memes are ever-shifting in the Internet communities, which are difficult to analyze due to their type-shifting and temporal-evolving nature. Although these memes are shifting, we find that different memes may share invariant principles, i.e., the underlying design concept of malicious users, which can help us analyze why these memes are harmful. In this paper, we propose RepMD, an ever-shifting harmful meme detection method based on the design concept reproduction. We first refer to the attack tree to define the Design Concept Graph (DCG), which describes steps that people may take to design a harmful meme. Then, we derive the DCG from historical memes with design step reproduction and graph pruning. Finally, we use DCG to guide the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to detect harmful memes. The evaluation results show that RepMD achieves the highest accuracy with 81.1% and has slight accuracy decreases when generalized to type-shifting and temporal-evolving memes. Human evaluation shows that RepMD can improve the efficiency of human discovery on harmful memes, with 15\sim30 seconds per meme.
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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
Leyi Pan Tsinghua University, Shuchang Tao Alibaba Group, Yunpeng Zhai Alibaba Group, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang University of Illinois at Chicago, Minghua He Peking University, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu 等 11 位作者
Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, existing dLLM policy optimization methods suffer from two critical reliability bottlenecks: (1) reward sparsity, arising from coarse or unverifiable signals that impede accurate advantage calculation; and (2) their probability estimates do not account for the gap to the unbiased expectation over all decoding orders, which are intractable to compute. To mitigate these issues, we propose d-TreeRPO, a reliable RL framework for dLLMs that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards to provide fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical proof demonstrating that increasing prediction confidence effectively minimizes the gap between unbiased expected prediction probabilities and its single-step forward pass estimate. Guided by this analysis, we introduce a time-scheduled self-distillation loss during training that enhances prediction confidence in later training stages, thereby enabling more accurate probability estimation and better performance. Experiments demonstrate that d-TreeRPO outperforms existing baselines and achieves significant improvements across multiple reasoning benchmarks. Specifically, it achieves +86.2% on Sudoku, +51.6% on Countdown, +4.5% on GSM8K, and +5.3% on Math500 compared to the base model.
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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