ACL 2026

2,650 papers

Can Compact Language Models Search Like Agents? Distillation-Guided Policy Optimization for Preserving Agentic RAG Capabilities

Rikuto Kotoge, Mai Nishimura, Jiaxin Ma

Dashboard2Code: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Reconstructing Interactive Dashboards

Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Qiguang Chen, Shiqi Zhou, Baocai Shan

MARD: Module-Aware Reasoning Distillation for Language Models with Adaptive Supervision

Wenqi Yang, Jianjun Li, Zhibo Zhang, Mingqian Ding, Yushen Fang

Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text using Temperature Sensitivity

Shixuan Ma, Jiahao Li, Zhendong Mao, Quan Wang

Execution as Verification: Fine-Grained Self-Correcting Reasoning for Complex KBQA

Minghan Zhang, Zhen Yang, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Zhen Duan

River-LLM: Large Language Model Seamless Exit Based on KV Share

Yingtao Shen, An Zou

R3: End-to-End Reasoning-based Planning for Multi-step Retrosynthesis via Reinforcement Learning

Yifei Wang, Qizhi Pei, Jiangtao Feng, Yuntian Shi, Yi Duan

Efficient Process Reward Modeling via Contrastive Mutual Information

Nakyung Lee, Sangwoo Hong, Jungwoo Lee

Impatient Users Confuse AI Agents: High-fidelity Simulations of Human Traits for Testing Agents

Muyu He, Anand Kumar, Soumyadeep Bakshi, James Zou, Nazneen Rajani

DiVE: Decoupling Intra-layer Visual Evidence for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

Xinwei Li, Li Lin, Hui Jiao, Li Yao, Tien-Tsin Wong

Beyond Static Benchmarks: Synthesizing Harmful Content via Persona-based Simulation for Robust Evaluation

Huije Lee, Jisu Shin, Hoyun Song, Changgeon Ko, Jong C. Park

TH-RAG : Topic-Based Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Robust Multi-hop Reasoning in Graph-based RAG Systems

JungHyoun Kim, Soohyeong Kim, Seok Jun Hwang, Jeonghyeon Park, Yong Suk Choi

Characterizing the Expressivity of Local Attention in Transformers

Jiaoda Li, Ryan Cotterell

LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning

Zerui Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Zhimin Wei, Linfeng Gao

From TDMA to CDMA: A Multi-bit Watermark for Diffusion Language Models

Baizhou Huang, Xiaojun Wan

ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution

Shouzheng Huang, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang

On Emergent Social World Models — Evidence for Functional Integration of Theory of Mind and Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

Polina Tsvilodub, Jan-Felix Klumpp, Amir Pour, Jennifer Hu, Michael Franke

Adaptive Retrieval for Reasoning

Jongho Kim, Jaeyoung Kim, Jihyuk Kim, Yu Jin Kim, Seung-won Hwang

CSRP: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Chinese Text Correction via Reinforcement Learning with Efficiency-Aware Rewards

Wei Tian, Yuhao Zhou, Man Lan

Resonating with RoPE: Spectral Quantization for High-Fidelity Key Cache Compression

Xuefei Wang, Haoyu Tang, Tianyuan Liang, Zhibin Wang, Yupeng Hu

Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming

Yuhao Li, Haifeng Sun, Xuesong Zhang, Shu Yao, Haoyu Zheng

Evolutionary Negative Module Pruning for Better LoRA Merging

Anda Cao, Zhuo Gou, Yi Wang, Kaixuan Chen, Yu Wang

DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward

xiaobo liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang

Beyond Markovian Forgetfulness: Episodic Memory for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

Dohyeon Lee, Yeonseok Jeong, Seung-won Hwang

Beyond Majority Voting: Towards Fine-grained and More Reliable Reward Signal for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Weiqin Wang, Yile Wang, Kehao Chen, Hui Huang

MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks

Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu

Grammar as Control: Modular Language Generation for the Long Tail

Ndapa Nakashole

AG-GRPO: Answer-Guided GRPO for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Juhyeong Kim, Gyunyeop Kim, Sangwoo Kang

TA-GRPO-d: Trajectory-Aware GRPO for Optimizing Denoising Trajectories in Diffusion LLMs

Gyunyeop Kim, Sangwoo Kang

Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression

Jiale Cheng, Yusen Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Yulin Fei, Wenyi Hong

MiniRAG: A Lightweight RAG system with Small Language Models

Tianyu Fan, Jingyuan Wang, Xubin Ren, Chao Huang

RISK: A Framework for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management

Renqi Chen, Zeyin Tao, Jianming Guo, Jingzhe Zhu, Yiheng Peng

VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning

Jingkun Ma, Runzhe Zhan, Yang Li, Di Sun, Hou Pong Chan

Enhancing Reinforcement Learning for Radiology Report Generation with Evidence-aware Rewards and Self-correcting Preference Learning

Qin Zhou, Guoyan Liang, Qianyi Yang, Jingyuan Chen, Sai Wu

Frozen LLMs are Native Decoders for High-Norm Semantic Vectors

Yunsheng Zeng, Yongmei Tan

From Detection to Understanding: Multi-Turn Reasoning for Video Misinformation Analysis

Zhi Zeng, Jiaying Wu, Minnan Luo, Di Zhang, Yifei Yang

R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling

Aijia Cheng, Kailong Wang, Ling Shi, Yongxin Zhao

ProMedical: Hierarchical Fine-Grained Criteria Modeling for Medical LLM Alignment via Explicit Injection

He Geng, Yangmin Huang, Lixian Lai, Qianyun Du, Hui Chu

IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation

Yinghao Tang, Xueding Liu, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie

Verbal-R3: Verbal Reranker as the Missing Bridge between Retrieval and Reasoning

Sangkwon Park, Donghun Kang, Jisoo Mok, Sungroh Yoon

Action Boundary Blindness: When LLM Agents Cannot Tell Where One Action Ends and Another Begins

Zhangyi Wang, Bingnan Yu, Jiexiang Xu, Zongze Li

The Side Effects of Being Smart: Safety Risks in MLLMs’ Multi-Image Reasoning

Renmiao Chen, Yida Lu, Shiyao Cui, Xuan Ouyang, Victor Shea-Jay Huang

MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI Agents

Dongming Jiang, Yi Li, Guanpeng Li, Bingzhe Li

ES4R: Speech Encoding Based on Prepositive Affective Modeling for Empathetic Response Generation

Zhuoyue Gao, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Wen Zhang, Daling Wang

ARCHITECT: Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Tool Learning via Causal Intervention for Open-World Agents

Zhangyi Wang, Jiexiang Xu, Bingnan Yu, Zongze Li

The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining

Jiandong Shao, Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Karin Sevegnani, Pontus Stenetorp

Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems

Yilun Zhao, Jinbiao Wei, Tingyu Song, Siyue Zhang, Chen Zhao

Joint Knowledge Base Completion and Question Answering by Combining Large Language Models and Small Language Models

Yinan Liu, Dongying Lin, Sigang Luo, Xiaochun Yang, Bin Wang

PaT: Planning-after-Trial for Efficient Test-Time Code Generation

Youngsik Yoon, Sungjae Lee, Seockbean Song, Siwei Wang, Wei Chen

SSG: Logit-Balanced Vocabulary Partitioning for LLM Watermarking

Chenxi Gu, Xiaoning Du, John C. Grundy

WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback

Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He

Towards Explainable Diagnosis: A Self-learned Explanatory Knowledge Base Approach

Dongqi Huang, Tong Zhou, Zhuoran jin, Shenghui Shi, Maoyujiao

The Dominance of Text Space: Unveiling the Asymmetric Nature of Cross-Modal Alignment in Large Language Models

Linqing Chen, Hanmeng Zhong, Wentao Wu, Peng Zhou

Reasoning Hijacking: The Fragility of Reasoning Alignment in Large Language Models

Yuansen Liu, Yixuan Tang, Anthony Kum Hoe Tung

Probing Audio-Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models through the Lens of Audio

Kaixiong Gong, Kaituo Feng, Bohao Li, Yibing Wang, Mofan Cheng

Mitigating Tokenization-Induced Distance Distortion in Long-Context Multilingual Machine Translation

Khotso Selialia, Antoine Nzeyimana, Fatima M. Anwar

How Context Shapes Truth: Geometric Transformations of Statement-level Truth Representations in LLMs

Shivam Adarsh, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma

An Existence Proof for Neural Language Models That Can Explain Garden-Path Effects via Surprisal

Ryo Yoshida, Shinnosuke Isono, Taiga Someya, Yohei Oseki, Tatsuki Kuribayashi

Test of Time: Rethinking Temporal Signal of Benchmark Contamination

Terry Jingchen Zhang, Gopal Dev, Ning Wang, Max Obreiter, Wenyuan Jiang

CHAIRO: Contextual Hierarchical Analogical Induction and Reasoning Optimization for LLMs

Haotian Lu, Yuchen Mou, Bingzhe Wu

Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detection

Jun Seo Kim, Hyemi Kim, Woo Joo OH, Hongjin Cho, Hochul Lee

InsAT: Instance-aware Semantic Alignment and Transfer from Human–Object Keypoints for Zero-to-Few-shot Action Understanding

Kazuki Tsutsukawa

Framing Political Bias in Multilingual LLMs Across Pakistani Languages

Afrozah Nadeem, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem

Memorization, Emergence, and Explaining Reversal Failures: A Controlled Study of Relational Semantics in LLMs

Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu, Jiaxin Wang, Fei Cheng, Chaoran Liu

SpecMind: Cognitively Inspired, Interactive Multi-Turn Framework for Postcondition Inference

Cuong Chi Le, Minh V.t. Pham, Tung D. Vu, Van Duc Cuong, Phan Nhật Huy

Interpretable Traces, Unexpected Outcomes: Investigating the Disconnect in Trace-Based Knowledge Distillation

Siddhant Bhambri, Upasana Biswas, Subbarao Kambhampati

LangSAE Editing: Improving Multilingual Information Retrieval via Post-hoc Language Identity Removal

Dongjun Kim, Jeongho Yoon, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

Diversity in Unity, Theory in Practice: Hierarchical Multitask Benchmarks for Chinese Minority Languages

Yijie Li, Xi Cao, Yuan Sun, Quulgan Minggad, Abdulla Ablikim

LazyEviction: Lagged KV Eviction with Attention Pattern Observation for Efficient Long Reasoning

Haoyue Zhang, Hualei Zhang, Xiaosong Ma, Jie Zhang, Song Guo

Turning Failures into Value: Negative Experience Replay for RLVR via Confidence Gating and Boundary Failure Sampling

Jialiang Guo, Fucheng Xiong, Xu He, Haodong Zhao, Xingyang li

SWAN: Semantic Watermarking with Abstract Meaning Representation

Ziping Ye, Gourab Dey, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Charith Peris, Anil Ramakrishna

Pub-LawBench: Public-Oriented Benchmarking for LegalAI

Qiaoyu Zheng, Zehan Ma, Yijing Zhang, Qiqi Wang, Huijia Li

Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture for Document Visual Question Answering

Haosen Wang, Jing Xiao, Chaochao Du, Xiaowang Zhang, Zhiyong Feng

Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration

Yuhan Wu, Huan Zhang, Wei Cheng, Chen Shen, Jingyue Yang

SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL

Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan

ReflectRM: Boosting Generative Reward Models via Self-Reflection within a Unified Judgment Framework

Kai Qin, Liangxin Liu, Yu Liang, Longzheng Wang, Wangyan

Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers

Songhao Wu, Ang Lv, Ruobing Xie, Samm Sun, Di Wang

PICTURE: Enhancing Theory-of-Mind in Large Language Models by Revealing, Not Hiding, Characters’ Lack of Knowledge

Eojin Jeon, SangKeun Lee

SAD: A Large-Scale Strategic Argumentative Dialogue Dataset

Yongkang Liu, Jiayang Yu, Mingyang Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Ercong Nie

Knowledge-driven Augmentation and Retrieval for Integrative Temporal Adaptation

Weisi Liu, Guangzeng Han, Xiaolei Huang

"Excuse me, may I say something..." CoLabScience, A Proactive AI Assistant for Biomedical Discovery and LLM-Expert Collaborations

Yang Wu, Jinhong Yu, Jingwei Xiong, Zhimin Tao, Xiaozhong Liu

Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning

Tianyi Men, Zhuoran jin, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu

PersonalAlign: Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent with Long-Term User-Centric Records

Yibo Lyu, Gongwei Chen, Rui Shao, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie

METER: Evaluating Multi-Level Contextual Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models

Pengfeng Li, Chen Huang, Chaoqun Hao, Hongyao Chen, Xiao-Yong Wei

LeCoDe: A Benchmark Dataset for Interactive Legal Consultation Dialogue Evaluation

Weikang Yuan, Kaisong Song, Zhuoren Jiang, Junjie Cao, Yujie Zhang

JurisBench: A Deep Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models in Professional Legal Practice

Ziang Chen, Guannan Li, Fanlin Ji, Yipeng Kang, Jiaqi Li

DUD: Decoupled Update Dynamics for Reliable Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models

Yixin Bu, Runze Xia, Guanyun Zou, Yupeng Ji, Hongliang Dai

Structured Semantic Information Helps Retrieve Better Examples for In-Context Learning Applied to Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Aunabil Chakma, Mihai Surdeanu, Eduardo Blanco

Attn-GS: Attention-Guided Context Compression for Efficient Personalized LLMs

Shenglai Zeng, Tianqi Zheng, Chuan Tian, Dante Everaert, Yau-Shian Wang

COSMOS: Connectivity-Oriented Submodular Maximization for Optimal Subgraph Retrieval

Boci Peng, Xiao Liu, Boren Hu, Yun Zhu, Xuanbo Fan

LLM-Powered Benchmark Factory: Reliable, Generic, and Efficient

Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang

Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

Runxuan Liu, Xianhao Ou, Xinyan Ma, Jiyuan Wang, Jiafeng Liang

If an LLM Were a Character, Would It Know Its Own Story? Evaluating Lifelong Learning in LLMs

Siqi Fan, Xiusheng Huang, Yiqun Yao, Xuezhi Fang, Kang Liu

TexOCR: Advancing Document OCR Models for Compilable Page-to-LaTeX Reconstruction

Chengye Wang, Lin Fu, Zexi Kuang, Yilun Zhao

Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing

Michael Ginn, Lindia Tjuatja, Enora Rice, Ali Marashian, Maria Valentini

VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG

Honghao Fu, Miao Xu, Yiwei Wang, Dailing Zhang, Jun Liu

GenomeQA: Benchmarking General Large Language Models for Genome Sequence Understanding

Weicai Long, Yusen Hou, Junning Feng, Houcheng Su, Shuo Yang

Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interaction

Advait Gosai, Tyler Vuong, Utkarsh Tyagi, Steven Li, Wenjia You

From Local to Global: Revisiting Structured Pruning Paradigms for Large Language Models

Ziyan Wang, Enmao Diao, Qi Le, Pu Wang, Minwoo Lee

Projecting Out the Malice: A Global Subspace Approach to LLM Detoxification

Zenghao Duan, Zhiyi Yin, Zhichao Shi, Liang Pang, Shaoling Jing