Ava Iranmanesh, Sobhan Lotfi, Ali Iranmanesh, Liwei Jiang
As large language models (LLMs) reach users worldwide, personal counseling has emerged as one of their most consequential applications, sometimes in life-critical situations. Yet broader access does not mean equal support. The text these models learn from disproportionately reflects people with the freedom to act, embedding an implicit assumption that users can leave, report, seek help, or appeal. Existing benchmarks largely inherit this assumption, overlooking users whose agency is constrained by structural conditions such as war, statelessness, and displacement. Meanwhile, models are increasingly shaped by normative frameworks such as Constitutional AI, often grounded in ideals like human rights, even as many users live where those rights offer little protection or recourse. We introduce HEARSAYBENCH, a human-authored dataset of 400 test cases with in-region human verification grounded in scenarios where structural barriers stand between a person and the exercise of their rights. Built from United Nations and other human rights reports, the scenarios span over 80 regions and cover social, environmental, and personal constraints. Drawing on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach, HEARSAYBENCH tests whether models can distinguish what a person is formally entitled to do from what they are actually able to do. Across 14 proprietary and open-weight models, every model infers a user's situation more accurately than it advises on it. Stronger models narrow this gap, but their recommendations remain unsafe to follow. Models may understand lives shaped by constraint, yet that knowledge remains hearsay if it cannot translate into advice people can act on. Those people are not alignment's long tail; they are among the users for whom good guidance matters most. HEARSAYBENCH makes this failure measurable, a step toward systems that serve the world as it is rather than as assumed.
Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Shanshan Feng, Jun Zhang, Tieyun Qian, Binhang Yuan, Kai Yin, Xiao Yan 等 9 位作者
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA). Most existing methods rely on semantic retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which suffers from fundamental limitations in complex temporal reasoning. On the one hand, semantic-based RAG methods struggle to capture the multi-hop causal knowledge required for complex temporal reasoning. On the other hand, these methods introduce excessive redundant knowledge, trapping LLMs in spurious reasoning chains that potentially result in erroneous answers. To address these problems, we propose a Temporal Causal Chain-guided RAG (TCC-RAG) to retrieve a concise yet sufficient set of causal knowledge to support complex temporal reasoning. Specifically, we reformulate the temporal knowledge graph into a multi-view causal cue graph, with causal cues inducing connections that explicitly encode temporal evolution and causal dynamics. Based on the causal cue graph, we construct a query-specific temporal causal chain to guide the retrieval process, enabling the model to focus on a concise set of causally relevant knowledge. Finally, we introduce a causal evidence filter to refine the retrieved knowledge, ensuring its causal consistency with the underlying temporal logic of the query. Experiments show that TCC-RAG achieves substantial performance gains of 10.72% and 8.40% on two TKGQA benchmarks, and delivers a remarkable 62.97% improvement for multi-step temporal reasoning.
In this paper, we investigate decentralized online convex optimization with compressed communication, where $n$ learners over a network jointly minimize a sequence of global loss functions based only on their local losses and compressed messages from their neighbors. The best known regret bounds for this problem are $O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1}\sqrt{T\ln n})$ and $O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-2}\ln n\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively, where $ρ\in(0,1)$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix and $ω\in(0,1]$ is the compression quality factor. Compared with the corresponding lower bounds of $Ω(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $Ω(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$, these upper bounds exhibit polynomial gaps in their dependence on $ρ^{-1}$. To close these gaps, we first develop Ascent-gossip, which combines an online compression strategy with a Chebyshev recursion and attains a faster consensus rate than existing compressed gossip methods. Furthermore, by adopting Ascent-gossip, we propose an online algorithm that achieves optimal regret bounds of $\widetilde O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $\widetilde O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively. Up to logarithmic factors in $n$ and $ρ^{-1}$, these results match the lower bounds in terms of $T$, $n$, $ρ$, and $ω$.
Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Xiaokai Zhou, Jiayue Li, Yi Li, Yue Liu, Jun Zhang, Xiaoling Zhou 等 11 位作者
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction relies on historical behaviors and contextual features to estimate clicks on a target item. Existing Transformer-based CTR models often adopt index-based or temporal positional encodings and token-level causal interaction. However, we observe that most existing positional encodings do not outperform NoPE, while relaxing causal constraints within target-relative temporal groups also yields gains. These observations motivate a fundamental question: what positional encoding and interaction granularity does CTR prediction actually require? To address this question, we propose \textbf{TRIP}, which combines target-aware rank--time positional encoding with temporal-group interaction modeling. Specifically, Factorized Rank Encoding represents each behavior's ordinal position within the historical sequence through a low-rank factorization, while Target-Relative Time Encoding characterizes its temporal distance to the target on a coarse-to-fine scale. This joint design grounds each behavior's positional representation in its sequence context and temporal relation to the current target. Furthermore, Temporal Group-Causal Interaction enriches intra-group representations through bidirectional interaction and masked reconstruction while preserving inter-group causal order. Finally, behavior representations are condensed into compact group summaries for efficient group-level modeling in subsequent layers. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that TRIP improves AUC by up to 4.45\% relative to the strongest baseline.
Sizhe Chen, Sanjay Kariyappa, Liwei Jiang, Chong Xiang, Jihye Choi, Chaowei Xiao, G. Edward Suh
The recent incident in which OpenAI agents autonomously compromised Hugging Face's infrastructure illustrates the importance of instruction hierarchy (IH): an LLM should follow lower-priority instructions, such as user requests, only when they do not conflict with higher-priority instructions, such as system policies. IH can be effectively improved by fine-tuning LLMs on simulated examples of instruction conflicts, whose diversity is key to teaching LLMs to properly handle conflicts at test time. However, our decomposition of a task into goals and constraints reveals a conflict type -- goal-goal conflicts -- that is absent from existing IH training sets from OpenAI and NVIDIA. We show the importance of this conflict type: fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B and Gemma4-12B-it on examples of this conflict type significantly improves IH on a wide range of real-world tasks unseen in training; adding these examples to existing IH training sets for fine-tuning also gives better IH adherence. The IH gains come with trivial mean utility changes on no-conflict tasks across eight benchmarks. Our work advocates including this new conflict type in IH training, even if these examples do not reflect typical LLM use.
Shufan Yang, Zifeng Cheng Nanjing University, Zhiwei Jiang Nanjing University, Qingfeng Qi, Yafeng Yin Nanjing University, Cong Wang Nanjing University, Ao Zhou, Qing Gu Nanjing University
Extracting embeddings directly from Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models is a promising yet underexplored direction that requires no additional data or fine-tuning. While previous studies have utilized semantic compression prompts or expert routing information to improve sentence embeddings, they typically allocate a fixed number of experts uniformly across all layers and tokens, ignoring inter-layer and inter-token heterogeneity. In this work, we identify two key observations in MoE models: (1) layer-wise variations in expert homogeneity, suggesting that different layers require different expert budgets, and (2) token-wise contribution imbalance, indicating that different tokens should also be allocated different numbers of experts. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive Expert Allocation (AEA) framework that dynamically performs both layer-wise and token-wise expert allocation to enhance embedding quality. Specifically, AEA allocates fewer experts to layers with higher homogeneity and to tokens with lower attention importance, where layer-wise homogeneity is determined by the similarity among embeddings produced by the experts in each layer. Notably, our method is plug-and-play, seamlessly integrates with existing prompt engineering methods, and introduces no additional time overhead. Experiments on the STS tasks demonstrate that AEA consistently improves embedding quality across multiple MoE models.
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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
Chenhui Mao Alibaba Group, Yuanting Lei, Zhixiang Wei, Ming Liang, Zhixiang Wang Peking University, Jingxuan Xu Beijing Jiaotong University, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang Ant Group 等 9 位作者
Agentic Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has delivered state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on complex software engineering tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, its practical adoption remains limited due to significant computational overhead, primarily driven by two key challenges: (1) the high cost associated with deploying excessively large ensembles, and (2) the lack of a reliable mechanism for selecting the optimal candidate solution—ultimately constraining the performance gains that can be realized. To address these challenges, we propose Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS), a novel TTS framework that dynamically balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropy-guided adaptive search and robust test-suite augmentation.Extensive experiments on SWE-Bench-Verified demonstrate that EGSS consistently boosts performance by 5–10% across all evaluated models. Specifically, it increases the resolved ratio of Kimi-K2-Intruct from 63.2% to 72.2%, and GLM-4.6 from 65.8% to 74.6%. Furthermore, when paired with GLM-4.6, EGSS achieves new state-of-the-art among open-source large language models. In addition to these accuracy improvements, EGSS reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% compared to existing TTS methods, achieving simultaneous gains in both effectiveness and computational efficiency.
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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
Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, benefiting from reinforcement learning paradigms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing approaches centers on offline training or local action-level rewards often trap agents in local optima, hindering effective exploration and error correction with the environment. Crucially, we find that directly applying task-level rewards often leads to convergence difficulties due to the sparse nature of GUI interactions. To address these challenges, we present Mobile-R1, a systematic training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. We propose a hierarchical curriculum consisting of three stages: (1) format alignment for reasoning structure, (2) on-policy exploration with verifiable action feedback to ground basic execution, and (3) multi-turn task-level training with realistic environment to unlock exploration and self-correction. This hierarchical strategy effectively bootstraps the agent, significantly enhancing its capability for exploration and self-correction (the “Eureka” moments). Furthermore, addressing the critical scarcity of diverse GUI data in non-English ecosystems, we contribute a comprehensive Chinese mobile dataset covering 28 applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations, and establish a rigorous benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.
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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
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled mobile agents to perceive and interact with real-world mobile environments based on human instructions. However, the current fully autonomous paradigm poses potential safety risks when model understanding or reasoning capabilities are insufficient. To address this challenge, we first introduce InquireBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate mobile agents’ capabilities in safe interaction and proactive inquiry with users, encompassing 5 categories and 22 sub-categories, where most existing VLM-based agents demonstrate near-zero performance. In this paper, we aim to develop an interactive system that actively seeks human confirmation at critical decision points. To achieve this, we propose InquireMobile, a novel model inspired by reinforcement learning, featuring a two-stage training strategy and an interactive pre-action reasoning mechanism. Finally, our model achieves an 46.8% improvement in inquiry success rate and the best overall success rate among existing baselines on InquireBench. The project page is available at https://bit-aqh.github.io/InquireMobile/homepage/.
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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
Hao Luo Wuhan University, Xiao Yan Wuhan University, Xinyan Li, Qiming Zeng Wuhan University, Yuhao Lin, Shanshan Feng Wuhan University and The Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Hao Wang Wuhan University, Jiawei Jiang Wuhan University
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex tasks by generating detailed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to apply a uniform, computation-intensive deep reasoning strategy to all problems, leading to unnecessary overhead on simple tasks. This significantly hinders their efficiency in real-world applications. While existing methods have improved reasoning efficiency to some extent, they still face critical challenges such as conflicting objectives, limited adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose AdaMix, an adaptive reasoning framework via decoupled optimization. To mitigate optimization conflicts, AdaMix first constructs two specialized adapters: an efficiency-oriented short adapter and an accuracy-oriented long adapter. It then incorporates a difficulty-aware routing model that assesses problem complexity to predict a reasoning intensity coefficient. This coefficient is used to dynamically interpolate a mixed adapter from the two base adapters, enabling fine-grained reasoning control. Our experiment demonstrates that our AdaMix reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B by 54.9% while improving accuracy by up to 4.8% on five mathematical datasets, thus indicating a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
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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
Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks. However, their effectiveness in embodied domains, where the agent must continuously interact with environments and process observation-action interleaved trajectories, remains largely unexplored. We present Embodied-Reasoner, a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks. Unlike mathematical reasoning that relies primarily on logical deduction, embodied scenarios demand spatial understanding, temporal reasoning, and ongoing self-reflection based on interaction history. To address these challenges, we synthesize 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes (analysis, spatial reasoning, reflection, planning, and verification). We develop a three-stage training recipe that progressively enhances the model’s capabilities through imitation learning, rejection sampling tuning on self-exploration trajectories, and reflection tuning. The evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms advanced visual reasoning models, e.g., exceeds OpenAI o1, o3-mini, and Claude-3.7 by +9%, 24%, and +13%. Analysis reveals that our model exhibits fewer repeated searches and logical inconsistencies, with particular advantages in complex long-horizon tasks. Real-world testing further validates the effectiveness of our approach.
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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
Zifeng Cheng Nanjing University, Lingyun Qian, Zhiwei Jiang Nanjing University, Cong Wang Nanjing University, Yafeng Yin Nanjing University, Fei Shen National University of Singapore and Tencent, Ao Zhou, Qing Gu Nanjing University
Extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a promising paradigm, as it requires neither additional data nor fine-tuning. Existing methods incorporate conditions into prompts to guide LLMs to focus on specific aspects and elicit conditional text embeddings. However, relying solely on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional text embeddings, as they remain entangled with general text embeddings, ultimately degrading their quality. To this end, we propose an inference-time, plug-and-play Self-Contrastive Steering (SCS) method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeddings, making them more focused on the target condition. Specifically, we modify the attention mask and positional encodings to mask the condition, thereby obtaining unconditional text embeddings and intervening in the multi-head self-attention computation process. Notably, our method is highly efficient, requiring only a single additional multi-head self-attention computation at inference time. Extensive experiments on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets demonstrate that our method can seamlessly improve the performance of existing prompt-based methods across different LLMs in a training-free and plug-and-play manner.
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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
Taylor Sorensen, Jared Moore, Jillian Fisher, Mitchell Gordon, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Christopher Michael Rytting, Andre Ye, Liwei Jiang 等 12 位作者
With increased power and prevalence of AI systems, it is ever more critical that AI systems are designed to serve all, i.e., people with diverse values and perspectives. However, aligning models to serve pluralistic human values remains an open research question. In this piece, we propose a roadmap to pluralistic alignment, specifically using language models as a test bed. We identify and formalize three possible ways to define and operationalize pluralism in AI systems: 1) Overton pluralistic models that present a spectrum of reasonable responses; 2) Steerably pluralistic models that can steer to reflect certain perspectives; and 3) Distributionally pluralistic models that are well-calibrated to a given population in distribution. We also formalize and discuss three possible classes of pluralistic benchmarks: 1) Multi-objective benchmarks, 2) Trade-off steerable benchmarks, which incentivize models to steer to arbitrary trade-offs, and 3) Jury-pluralistic benchmarks which explicitly model diverse human ratings. We use this framework to argue that current alignment techniques may be fundamentally limited for pluralistic AI; indeed, we highlight empirical evidence, both from our own experiments and from other work, that standard alignment procedures might reduce distributional pluralism in models, motivating the need for further research on pluralistic alignment.