Before a machine learning model can learn a thermodynamic equation of state, it must discover what its measurements represent: which channels scale with system size, which are intensive conjugates, how sectors pair through contact, and which potential governs stability. When sensors expose only an unknown linear mixture of extensive states and intensive responses, passive observations cannot disentangle physical quantities from coordinate artifacts. We formulate the problem of discovering this hidden thermodynamic ontology directly from anonymous controlled experiments. We present an operational identifiability theory and a constructive polynomial-time algorithm that extracts extensive and intensive scaling sectors from replication contrasts, recovers their dual cotangent pairing from thermal contact and reciprocity, verifies a globally admissible concave potential via discrete cyclic concavity, and determines an invariant matroid of reservoir ensembles. We prove that the residual observational equivalence is strictly (x, lambda) ~ (A x, a A^{-T} lambda + beta), establishing the sharp observational limit that no permitted experiment can break. Blind evaluations on van der Waals fluids and Curie-Weiss magnets confirm robust recovery under ill-conditioned mixing, correctly resolving anonymous Maxwell tie-lines while rejecting non-equilibrium continuations. External validation across six real fluids from the NIST WebBook demonstrates that operational ontology discovery transfers across real physical substances without coordinate leakage.
Online vectorized map construction provides autonomous vehicles with essential, real-time semantic and geometric scene understanding. While leveraging prior maps presents an opportunity to improve accuracy, they are often biased due to outdated information or temporary road changes. Existing methods, which typically treat priors as fully reliable or only consider limited noise patterns, suffer severe performance degradation when these priors are imperfect. To address this, we propose PriorMaskMap, a robust framework for prior-guided vectorized map construction. Its first innovation is a Prior-Aware Confidence Estimator (PACE) that evaluates the input rasterized map against current visual observations. It assigns confidence scores to regions classified as reliable, erroneous, or blank, creating a foundational mask that guides two subsequent branches. In one branch, the Dual-Prior Query Generator (DPQG) selectively filters and embeds both rasterized and vectorized priors to initialize informative queries from trustworthy map structures. In the other, the Confidence-Guided Prior Fusion (CGPF) module spatially propagates and refines the mask, using the refined version to govern the fusion of BEV features with the prior map, thereby providing rich contextual representations for the map decoder. Evaluation on the nuScenes dataset shows that PriorMaskMap achieves superior mapping precision over existing approaches and exhibits marked robustness when provided with priors containing apparent errors. Our code is released at https://github.com/healenrens/PriorMaskMap.
We study amplitude-only rescaling of feed-forward network (FFN) activations to repair tool calls and other structured outputs, using multiplicative coordinate masks rather than additive steering vectors. Amplitude Gating (AG) keeps pretrained weights fixed and applies magnitude/entropy-based masks at six SwiGLU sites, with a Newton-Schulz windowed ranking variant. Across three Qwen checkpoints and six text/tool endpoints, effects are task dependent. Under frozen local scorers, Qwen3.5-9B non-NS configurations improve two function-call endpoints by +2.61/+2.67 percentage points (pp) and static ToolBench in/out-domain by +1.64/+2.82 pp; JSON gains are small. These gains survive comparing the weaker of two observed AG runs with the stronger baseline, supporting observed-run robustness rather than population significance. Scores measure lexical or answer/action-name agreement, not executed-tool success. Under the current experimental conditions, the six-task random-forest refit improves native score by +0.46 pp with a positive conditional paired interval; transfer to other settings requires further evaluation. The results support task-specific interventions; causal mechanisms, equal-budget advantages, repeated-run uncertainty, and serving cost require further evaluation. Code and experimental data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23654706.
Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating robot agents in realistic, open-world household environments. Through an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop real-to-sim pipeline, RAB constructs 50 diverse household layouts with interactive objects and physically grounded tasks, encompassing 90 atomic tasks, 18 short-horizon tasks, 8 long-horizon tasks, and 4 open-ended scenarios. RAB provides a multi-level evaluation of robot agent capabilities: (1) task-level assessments systematically examine five complementary dimensions: task discovery, context reasoning, manipulation, failure recovery, and robustness; (2) scenario-level evaluation assesses how agents integrate these capabilities to autonomously fulfill high-level user needs. Furthermore, RAB enables systematic comparisons of standalone VLA/WAM models and diverse robot agent architectures under a unified planning-execution-verification framework. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between manipulation and autonomy, demonstrate the advantages of agentic architectures and recursive self-improvement, and highlight the remaining challenges toward open-world robot autonomy.
Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu 等 10 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional single-round retrieval struggles with complex multi-step reasoning.Agentic RAG addresses this by enabling LLMs to dynamically decide when and what to retrieve, but current RL-based training methods suffer from sparse outcome rewards that discard intermediate signals and low sample efficiency where failed samples contribute nothing.We propose Search-P1, a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training, comprising two key components: (1) Path-Centric Reward, which evaluates the structural quality of reasoning trajectories through order-agnostic step coverage and soft scoring that extracts learning signals even from failed samples, and (2) Dual-Track Path Scoring with offline-generated reference planners that assesses paths from both self-consistency and reference-alignment perspectives.Experiments on multiple QA benchmarks demonstrate that Search-P1 achieves significant improvements over Search-R1 and other strong baselines, with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu 等 10 位作者
Industrial advertising question answering (QA) is a high-stakes task in which hallucinated content, particularly fabricated URLs, can lead to financial loss, compliance violations, and legal risk. Although Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted, deploying it in production remains challenging because industrial knowledge is inherently relational, frequently updated, and insufficiently aligned with generation objectives. We propose a reinforced co-adaptation framework that jointly optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: (1) Graph-aware Retrieval (GraphRAG), which models entity-relation structure over a high-citation knowledge subgraph for multi-hop, domain-specific evidence selection; and (2) evidence-constrained reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with multi-dimensional rewards covering faithfulness, style compliance, safety, and URL validity. Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, and safety, while reducing the hallucination rate by 72%. A two-week online A/B test demonstrates a 28.6% increase in like rate, a 46.2% decrease in dislike rate, and a 92.7% reduction in URL hallucination. The system has been running in production for over half a year and has served millions of QA interactions.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhixuan Yang, Fu Zhang Northeastern University, Huangming Xu, Jingwei Cheng Northeastern University, China
Cross-document Relation Extraction (CodRE) requires reasoning over scattered evidence to identify relations between target entities across multiple documents. Existing methods indiscriminately fuse target entities and the intermediate bridge entities that link them into a unified representation. This leads to intermediate evidence that often aligns with only one side of the entity pair, resulting in one-sided relation transfer contextual bias and incomplete reasoning chains. Moreover, these methods typically employ a global threshold to determine relation existence for all entity pairs, limiting the model’s reasoning performance.To address these issues, we propose DEBAR (Dual-stream Entity Bias Reduction), a framework designed to explicitly decouple and preserve bidirectional bridge evidence, combined with a novel dynamic loss optimization objective. Specifically, DEBAR employs a bridge-aware input construction strategy and a dual-stream graph reasoning network to separately encode head and tail contexts, preventing semantic interference while capturing global dependencies through iterative message passing. Furthermore, we introduce a curriculum-aware ranking optimization objective that progressively tightens classification constraints to stabilize training and enforce discriminative decision boundaries. Experiments on the CodRE benchmarks show that DEBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance while effectively mitigating cross-document contextual bias. Moreover, extensive experiments on our proposed loss across backbones confirm its generalization, suggesting it as a reliable replacement for existing CodRE losses. Code is available at https://github.com/newyuyou/DEBAR.
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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
Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang Tencent, Qiming Xu Beijing Technology and Business University, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li 等 9 位作者
Interleaved multimodal understanding and generation—where models can interactively comprehend and produce images and text in arbitrary orders—has emerged as a key research direction in generative Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs). Such interleaved image–text content plays an increasingly important role in information dissemination. However, the compounded persuasive power of multimodal narratives also raises the risk of factual misinformation. Despite this, existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image–text content. To bridge this gap, we introduce FactVerse, a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. FactVerse comprises 3,000 human-verified instances across four categories and 50 domains, supporting both English and Chinese. We also establish a multi-dimensional evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess factual consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves high alignment with human judgments, significantly outperforming existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, our analysis reveals systematic deficiencies in current models, offering critical insights for future design.
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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
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors, ranging from misaligned intent to inconsistent personality, pose significant risks. We introduce SteerEval, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. Each domain is structured into three specification levels: L1 (what to express), L2 (how to express), and L3 (how to instantiate), connecting high-level behavioral intent to concrete textual output. Using SteerBench, we systematically evaluate contemporary steering methods, revealing that control often degrades at finer-grained levels. Our benchmark offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior, serving as a foundation for 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
Yunbo Long, Yuhan Liu University of Cambridge, Liming Xu University of Cambridge
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for automated negotiation, but their high computational cost and privacy risks limit deployment in privacy-sensitive, on-device settings such as mobile assistants or rescue robots. Small language models (SLMs) offer a viable alternative, yet struggle with the complex emotional dynamics of high-stakes negotiation. We introduce EmoMAS, a Bayesian multi-agent framework that transforms emotional decision-making from reactive to strategic. EmoMAS leverages a Bayesian orchestrator to coordinate three specialized agents: game-theoretic, reinforcement learning, and psychological coherence models. The system fuses their real-time insights to optimize emotional state transitions while continuously updating agent reliability based on negotiation feedback. This mixture-of-agents architecture enables online strategy learning without pre-training. We further introduce four high-stakes, edge-deployable negotiation benchmarks across debt, healthcare, emergency response, and educational domains. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across all benchmarks, both SLMs and LLMs equipped with EmoMAS consistently surpass all baseline models in negotiation performance while balancing ethical behavior. These results show that strategic emotional intelligence is a key driver of negotiation success. By treating emotional expression as a strategic variable within a Bayesian multi-agent optimization framework, EmoMAS establishes a new paradigm for effective, private, and adaptive negotiation AI suitable for high-stakes edge deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/Yunbo-max/EmoMAS.
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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
Huangming Xu, Fu Zhang Northeastern University, Zhixuan Yang, Lu Zhang, Jingwei Cheng Northeastern University, China
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine which relations hold between a given entity pair within a document. As a multi-label classification task, the most commonly adopted paradigm introduces a learnable threshold to distinguish positive and negative classes for an entity pair. Under this paradigm, existing losses decouple the optimization into independent positive and negative losses, which interact solely with a shared threshold. This leads to two inherent limitations: (i) threshold instability caused by conflicting gradient updates from the decoupled losses; and (ii) optimization bias exacerbated by the severe imbalance between limited positive samples and abundant negative samples inherent in DocRE, which makes the model more likely to predict that no relation exists.To address these issues, we propose the Adaptive-Threshold Global Loss (ATGL). Unlike prior work, ATGL integrates positive, negative, and threshold optimization into a unified logit space and explicitly enforces ranking constraints on their contributions to the objective. Furthermore, ATGL incorporates an imbalance-aware optimization mechanism, thereby effectively addressing the severe class imbalance in DocRE. Our ATGL serves as a general optimization objective that can be readily applied to different DocRE models. Experiments on four datasets show that ATGL outperforms other DocRE losses and achieves state-of-the-art results, while consistently improving the performance of existing DocRE models. Code is available at https://github.com/xhm-code/ATGL.
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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
Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao Zhejiang University, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng Zhejiang University, Jeff Z. Pan University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh 等 10 位作者
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, correctness alone is insufficient. Reliable deployment requires maintaining truthful beliefs under contextual perturbations. Existing evaluations largely rely on point-wise confidence like Self-Consistency, which can mask brittle belief. We show that even facts answered with perfect self-consistency can rapidly collapse under mild contextual interference. To address this gap, we propose Neighbor-Consistency Belief (NCB), a structural measure of belief robustness that evaluates response coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. To validate the efficiency of NCB, we introduce a new cognitive stress-testing protocol that probes outputs stability under contextual interference. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that the performance of high-NCB data is relatively more resistant to interference. Finally, we present Structure-Aware Training (SAT), which optimizes context-invariant belief structure and reduces long-tail knowledge brittleness by approximately 30%.
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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
Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei, Ryan Burnell, Libin Bai, Anmol Gulati, Garrett Tanzer, Damien Vincent 等 1137 位作者
In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.