ACL 2026

2,650 papers

Chaining the Evidence: Robust Reinforcement Learning for Deep Search Agents with Citation-Aware Rubric Rewards

Jiajie Zhang, Xin Lv, Ling Feng, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li

Language Reconstruction with Brain Predictive Coding from fMRI Data

Congchi Yin, Ziyi Ye, Piji Li

Don’t Adapt Small Language Models for Tools; Adapt Tool Schemas to the Models

Jonggeun Lee, Woojung Song, Jongwook Han, Haesung Pyun, Yohan Jo

Unveiling the Unknown: Open-Set Entity Typing via Two-Stage Generation

Hu Chen, Binhan Yang, Wei Shen

HiSVD: Principled Low-Rank Approximation of LLMs via Hierarchical Modeling of Information Capacity and Spectral Structure

Zhuo Chen, Minghao Li, Xiaoqian Ma, Siqi Fan, Xiusheng Huang

Breaking Block Boundaries: Anchor-based History-stable Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models

Shun Zou, Yong Wang, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Chongyang Tao

SpeakerSleuth: Can Large Audio-Language Models Judge Speaker Consistency across Multi-turn Dialogues?

Jonggeun Lee, Junseong Pyo, Gyuhyeon Seo, Yohan Jo

Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation

Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao

AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora

Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li

Toward Robust In-Context Learning: Leveraging Out-of-distribution Proxies for Target Inaccessible Demonstration Retrieval

Hao Xu, Rite Bo, Fausto Giunchiglia, Yingji Li, Rui Song

ClusterRAG: Cluster-Based Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Gibson Nkhata, Uttamasha Anjally Oyshi, Quan Mai, Susan Gauch

R^3AG: Retriever Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Tong Zhao, Yutao Zhu, Yucheng Tian, Zhicheng Dou

AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation

Rui Qian, Chuanhang Deng, Qiang Huang, Jian Xiong, Mingxuan Li

HSCodeComp: A Realistic and Expert-level Agent Benchmark for Hierarchical Rule Application

Tian Lan, Yiqian Yang, Qianghuai Jia, Li Zhu, Hui Jiang

How Should We Enhance the Safety of Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study

Zhexin Zhang, Xian Qi Loye, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Junxiao Yang, Qi Zhu

THOR: A Theta-Gamma Hierarchical Oscillatory Reasoning Framework for Multi-hop QA

Ziyang Ling, Ronald X. Xu, Mingzhai Sun

Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning

Yifan Li, YuKai Gu, Yingqian Min, Zikang Liu, Yifan Du

Bridging Internal Consistency and External Alignment: A Causal and Dynamic Interpretability Framework for LLM Generation

Shuyao Xiao, Shengling Wang, Ke Chao

Beyond Ranking: Fine-Grained Diagnostics and Self-Improvement for MLLMs

Mingze Xu, Zijing Zhao, Qiming Peng, Houwen Peng, Han Hu

ReEfBench: Quantifying the Reasoning Efficiency of LLMs

Zhizhang Fu, Yuancheng Gu, Chenkai Hu, Hanmeng Liu, Yue Zhang

Zero-Shot Multimodal Retrieval with Multi-Scale Contextual Representations

Sourajit Saha, Tejas Gokhale

Think Before Writing: Feature-Level Multi-Objective Optimization for Generative Citation Visibility

Zikang Liu, Peilan Xu

Uncovering Sentiment Analysis Circuit in Large Language Model

Shichen Li, Zhouyang Wang, Zhongqing Wang, Peifeng Li

PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling

Ai Jian, Jingqing Ruan, Xing Ma, Dailin Li, Weipeng Zhang

SPENCE: A Syntactic Probe for Detecting Contamination in NL2SQL Benchmarks

Mohammadtaher Safarzadeh, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Afshin Oroojlooy, Graham Horwood, Dan Roth

The Paradox of Outcome Optimization: A Causal Information-Theoretic Bound on Reasoning Shortcuts in LLMs

Zihan Chen, Yiming Zhang, Wenxiang Geng, Zenghui Ding, Yining Sun

Leibniz: Theory-of-Mind Driven Neuro-Symbolic Logical Reasoning via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Yue Fan, Hu Zhang, Yunxiao Zhao, Guangjun Zhang, Hao Zhan

RARE: Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation Framework for High-Similarity Corpora

Hanjun Cho, Jay-Yoon Lee

League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models

Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma

Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention

Zhen Yang, Mingyang Zhang, Feng Chen, Ganggui Ding, Liang Hou

Backdoor Collapse: Eliminating Unknown Threats Via Known Backdoor Aggregation In Language Models

Liang Lin, Miao Yu, Moayad Aloqaily, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang

Preconditioned Test-Time Adaptation for Out-of-Distribution Debiasing in Narrative Generation

Hanwen Shen, Ting Ying, Jiajie Lu, Shanshan Wang

CAKE: Causal-Guided Adaptive Knowledge Editing for LLMs

Shuxin Liu, Jianhao Zhang

Merlin’s Whisper: Enabling Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models via Black-box Persuasive Prompting

Heming Xia, Cunxiao Du, Rui Li, Chak Tou Leong, Yongqi Li

Benchmarking and Enabling Efficient Chinese Medical Retrieval via Asymmetric Encoders

Angqing Jiang, Jianlyu Chen, Zhefang, Yongcan Wang, Xinpeng Li

SubTokenTest: A Practical Benchmark for Real-World Sub-token Understanding

Shuyang Hou, Yi Hu, Muhan Zhang

Why LLMs Hallucinate on Structured Knowledge: A Mechanistic Analysis of Reasoning over Linearized Representations

Shanghao Li, Jinda Han, Yibo Wang, Yuanjie Zhu, Zihe Song

MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation

Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou

Seeing the Whole Elephant: A Benchmark for Failure Attribution in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

Mengzhuo Chen, Junjie Wang, Fangwen Mu, Yawen Wang, Zhe Liu

IS-CoT: Breaking the Long-form Generation Collapse via Interleaved Structural Thinking

Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu

HTMR: Hybrid Token Masking Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Event Argument Extraction with Multi-Perspective Reasoning

Jianwen Luo, Yongkang Jin, Yu Hong, Jianmin Yao

DVMap: Fine-Grained Pluralistic Value Alignment via High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping

pengyun zhu, Yuqi Ren, Zhen Wang, Lei Yang, Deyi Xiong

Distillation Traps and Guards: A Calibration Knob for LLM Distillability

Weixiao Zhan, Yongcheng Jing, Leszek Rutkowski, Dacheng Tao

DeepGuard: Secure Code Generation via Multi-Layer Semantic Aggregation

Li Huang, Zhongxin Liu, Yifan Wu, Tao Yin, Dong Li

Learning What Matters: Dynamic Dimension Selection and Aggregation for Interpretable Vision-Language Reward Modeling

Qiyuan Chen, Hongsen Huang, Jiahe Chen, Qian Shao, Jintai Chen

STK-Adapter: Incorporating Evolving Graph and Event Chain for Temporal Knowledge Graph Extrapolation

Shuyuan Zhao, Wei Chen, Weijie Zhang, Xinrui Hou, Junfeng Shen

UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization

Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song

Region-Grounded Report Generation for 3D Medical Imaging: A Fine-Grained Dataset and Graph-Enhanced Framework

Cong Huy Nguyen, Son Dinh Nguyen, Guanlin Li, Tuan Dung Nguyen, Aditya Narayan Sankaran

HiGoE: Hierarchical Graph of Evidence to Enhance Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-context Summarization

Long Yuan, Kaiwen Tian, Zi Chen, Bolong Zheng, Chuan Ma

NaturalSloth: Revisiting Denial-of-Service Attacks on Large Language Models

Yiming Chen, Zexin Li, Xianghu Yue, Robby T. Tan, Haizhou Li

Fine-Mem: Fine-Grained Feedback Alignment for Long-Horizon Memory Management

Weitao Ma, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Zhanyu Ma

ReFL: Reflective Feedback Learning for Hallucination Detection of Large Language Models

Cunhang Fan, Jun Zhang, Xue Zhang, SHUAI ZHANG, Zhao Lv

NOSE: Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding with Tri-Modal Orthogonal Contrastive Learning

Yanyi Su, Hongshuai Wang, Zhifeng Gao, Jun Cheng

Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play

Xiachong Feng, Deyi Yin, Xiaocheng Feng, Yi Jiang, Libo Qin

CAML: A Conflict-Aware Molecular Language Model Merging Framework for Multi-Constraint Molecular Generation

Xuanbai Ren, Luoda Tan, Pei Liu, Tengfei Ma, Xiangzheng Fu

Language Acquisition Device in Large Language Models

Masato Mita, Taiga Someya, Ryo Yoshida, Yohei Oseki

When Bigger Isn’t Better: A Comprehensive Fairness Evaluation of Political Bias in Multi-News Summarisation

Nannan Huang, Iffat Maab, Junichi Yamagishi

Maximizing Local Entropy Where It Matters: Prefix-Aware Localized LLM Unlearning

Naixin Zhai, Pengyang Shao, Binbin Zheng, Yonghui Yang, Fei Shen

Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Peiru Yang, Haoran Zheng, Tong Ju, Shiting Wang, Wanchun Ni

MVP: Enhancing Video Large Language Models via Self-supervised Masked Video Prediction

Xiaokun Sun, Zezhong Wu, Zewen Ding, Linli Xu

Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem

Zeguan Xiao, Siqing Li, Yong Wang, Xuetao Wei, Jian Yang

Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Training, Inference, and Failures

Yi Hu, Jiaqi Gu, Ruxin Wang, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng

CodeJudgeBench: Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Coding Tasks

Hongchao Jiang, Yiming Chen, Yushi Cao, Hung-yi Lee, Robby T. Tan

Chain-of-Thought Compression Should Not Be Blind: V-Skip for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Path Anchoring

Dongxu Zhang, Yiding Sun, Cheng Tan, Wenbiao Yan, Ning Yang

Causal-ESC: Reliable Policy Learning for Emotional Support Conversation via Causal Inference

Xv Wang, Wang Zhenyu, Guanyu Zheng, Rui Zhang

RFS-Guard: Detecting Reasoning Hallucinations via Cross-Phase Routing Focus in Large Reasoning Models

Zihang Liu, Fang Zhouhua, Hui LIU, Zhiwei Liu, Yong Li

Identity-Robust Language Model Generation via Content Integrity Preservation

Miao Zhang, Kelly Chen, Mehrab Tanjim, Rumi Chunara

Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward

Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, Yanbingren, Jialin Liu

Dynamics of Cognitive Heterogeneity: Investigating Behavioral Biases in Multi-Stage Supply Chains with LLM-Based Simulation

Jiuyun Jiang, Yuecheng Hong, Bo Yang, Jin Yang, Guangxin Jiang

Progressive Multimodal Search and Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering

Changin Choi, Wonseok Lee, Jungmin Ko, Wonjong Rhee

BWLA: Breaking the Barrier of W1AX Post-Training Quantization for LLMs

Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Dawei Yang

Double: Breaking the Acceleration Limit via Double Retrieval Speculative Parallelism

Yuhao Shen, Tianyu Liu, Junyi Shen, Jinyang Wu, Quan Kong

EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation

Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, Yanbingren, Jialin Liu

Discourse Coherence and Response-Guided Context Rewriting for Multi-Party Dialogue Generation

Zhiyu Cao, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu

Cut Your Losses! Learning to Prune Paths Early for Efficient Parallel Reasoning

Jiaxi Bi, Tongxu Luo, Wenyu Du, Zhengyang Tang, Benyou Wang

Your Students Don’t Use LLMs Like You Wish They Did

Sebastian Kobler, Matthew Clemson, Angela Sun, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld

FACTrial: Factorized Clinical Contrastive Training for Scalable Patient-Trial Retrieval

Xuanren Chen, Chongyang Tao, Tao Shen, Shuai Ma

ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs

Jinshuo Liu, Cheng Bi, Meng Wang, Juan Deng, Donghong Ji

StoryCoder: Narrative Reformulation for Structured Reasoning in LLM Code Generation

Geonhui Jang, Dongyoon Han, YoungJoon Yoo

Suggest-Verify-Revise: A Three-Stage Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Narrative Consistency

Ya Su, Hu Zhang, Dan Qiao, Yujie Wang, Yunxiao Zhao

Hierarchical Token Prepending: Enhancing Information Flow in Decoder-based LLM Embeddings

Xueying Ding, Xingyue Huang, Mingxuan Ju, Liam Collins, Yozen Liu

TLSA: LLM-Guided Text-Label Space Alignment with Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery

Wenxi Xu, Chuan Qin, Xi Chen, Chuyu Fang, Yuanchun Zhou

FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection

Fuyuan Liu, Dianyu Yu, He Ren, Nayu Liu, Xiaomian Kang

Know the Known and the Unknown: Reasonable Answer Generation with Knowledge-Informed Citations

Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo, Jun Xu, Mengshu Sun

SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models

Yuanhe Zhang, Jiayu Tian, Yibo Zhang, Shilinlu Yan, Liang Lin

Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Target Language Adaptation of LLMs via Source-Shielded Updates

Atsuki Yamaguchi, Terufumi Morishita, Aline Villavicencio, Nikolaos Aletras

WildReward: Learning Reward Models from In-the-Wild Human Interactions

Hao Peng, Yunjia Qi, Xiaozhi Wang, Zijun Yao, Lei Hou

DisCo_Speech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec

Tao Li, Wenshuo Ge, Zhichao Wang, Zihao Cui, Yong Ma

Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults

ZhenHao Zhou, Zhuochen Huang, Yike He, Chong Wang, Jiajun Wang

TellWhisper: Tell Whisper Who Speaks When

Yifan Hu, Peiji Yang, Zhisheng Wang, Yicheng Zhong, Rui Liu

REG: Retrieval via Emotion Similarity for Guiding Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Xu Wang, Bo Wang, Yang Xiang, Yihong Tang, Dongming Zhao

SpecCache: Speculative KV Cache Reuse for Efficient RAG Serving

Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo

Logical Phase Transitions: Understanding Collapse in LLM Logical Reasoning

Xinglang Zhang, Yunyao Zhang, Zeliang Chen, Junqing Yu, Wei Yang

Closing the Modality Reasoning Gap for Speech Large Language Models

Chaoren Wang, Heng Lu, Xueyao Zhang, Shujie LIU, Yan Lu

GTA: Generating Long-horizon Tasks for Web Agents at Scale

Tenghao Huang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Yilun Zhou, Muhao Chen

ToolPRM: Fine-Grained Inference Scaling of Structured Outputs for Function Calling

Jianghao Lin, Yuanyuan Shi, Xin Peng, Renjie Ding, Hairui Wang

Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation

Seokhoon Kang, Yejin Jeon, Seonjeong Hwang, Gary Lee

Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting?

Xinyu Li, Kexi Chen, Jiajie Shen, Ying Zheng, Hong Lu

FineSteer: A Unified Framework for Fine-Grained Inference-Time Steering in Large Language Models

Zixuan Weng, Jinghuai Zhang, Kunlin Cai, Ying Li, Peiran Wang

MSMO-ABSA: Multi-Scale and Multi-Objective Optimization for Cross-Lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

ChengYan Wu, Bolei Ma, Ningyuan Deng, He Yanqing, Yun Xue