ACL 2026

2,650 papers

Knowledge is Not Enough: Injecting RL Skills for Continual Adaptation

Pingzhi Tang, Yiding Wang, Muhan Zhang

MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matching

Changle Qu, Sunhao Dai, Hengyi Cai, Jun Xu, Shuaiqiang Wang

Unlearners Can Lie: Evaluating and Improving Honesty in LLM Unlearning

Renjie Gu, Jiazhen Du, Yihua Zhang, Sijia Liu

Beyond "I Don’t Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty

Jingyi Ren, Ante Wang, Yunghwei Lai, Xiaolong Wang, Linlu GONG

LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection

Cheng Xu, Changhong Jin, Yingjie Niu, Nan Yan, Yuke Mei

DecoCal: Decoding with Calibration in Diffusion Large Language Models

Fan Xu, Huixuan Zhang, Xiaojun Wan

EvoNarrator: Modeling Scientific Evolution for Feasible Hypothesis Generation

Xiaoying Le, Pengfei Qian, Yuanzhao Zhai, Xu Zhang, Qian Liu

From Trust to Compromise: Outcome-Verified LLM Phishing Simulation and Real-Time Defense

Tulika Tewari, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage, Jagat Sesh Challa, Dhruv Kumar

Exploring Layer Activation Dynamic of CoT via Knowledge Probe

Chuanxin Zhang, Jiajun Liu, Yao He, Wenjun Ke, Peng Wang

Fingerprinting LLMs via Prompt Injection

Yuepeng Hu, Zhengyuan Jiang, MengYuan Li, Osama Ahmed, Zhicong Huang

KV-Embedding: Training-free Text Embedding via Internal KV Re-routing in Decoder-only LLMs

Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang

Why Do Emotions Change? Appraisal-Guided Reasoning for Emotion–Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations

Qiao Liang, Ying Shen, Yao Liu, Tiantian Chen, Lin Zhang

Cognitive Alpha Mining via LLM-Driven Code-Based Evolution

Fengyuan Liu, Yi Huang, Sichun Luo, Yuqi Wang, Yazheng Yang

Adaptive Prompt Structure Factorization: A Framework for Self-Discovering and Optimizing Compositional Prompt Programs

Haoyue Liu, Zhichao Wang, Yongxin Guo, Haoran Shou, Xiaoying Tang

Efficient Test-Time Scaling of Multi-Step Reasoning by Probing Internal States of Large Language Models

Jingwei Ni, Ekaterina Fadeeva, Tianyi Wu, Mubashara Akhtar, Jiaheng Zhang

WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics

Chenxu Liu, Yingjie Fu, Wei Yang, Ying Zhang, Tao Xie

Chain-of-Memory: Lightweight Memory Construction with Dynamic Evolution for LLM Agents

Xiucheng Xu, Bingbing Xu, Tian Xueyun, Zihe Huang, Rongxin Chen

From Verbatim to Gist: Distilling Pyramidal Multimodal Memory via Semantic Information Bottleneck for Long-Horizon Video Agents

Niu Lian, Yuting Wang, Hanshu Yao, Jinpeng Wang, Bin Chen

Losing our Tail, Again: (Un)Natural Selection & Multilingual LLMs

Eva Vanmassenhove

MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing Agents

Chonghua Liao, Ke Wang, Yuchuan Wu, Ruoran Li, Fei Huang

Evolving Sparsity: Leveraging Token Importance Dynamics for Efficient LLM Decoding with Sparse Attention

Ruizi Han, Miao Zhang, Ziyue Qiao, Liqiang Nie

SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs

Sihang Zhao, Kangrui Yu, Youliang Yuan, Pinjia He, Hongyi Wen

Provably Safe Offline-to-Online RL: Decoupling Learning from Data-Driven Safety Enforcement

Kaitong Cai, Jusheng Zhang, Keze Wang

Lifting Optimized Binaries to Canonical Compiler IR via Structure-Aware Retrieval and Iterative Verification

Xiaoao Zhu, Jie Ren, Zhiqiang Li, Jie Zheng, Zhanyong Tang

Just Pass Twice: Efficient Token Classification with LLMs for Zero-Shot NER

Ahmed Ewais, Ahmed Hashish, Amr Ali

HarmRLVR: Weaponizing Verifiable Rewards for Harmful LLM Alignment

Yuexiao Liu, Lijun Li, Xingjun Wang, Jing Shao

LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Models

Fengqi Zhu, Rongzhen Wang, Shen Nie, Xiaolu Zhang, Chunwei Wu

C2: Scalable Rubric-Augmented Reward Modeling from Binary Preferences

Akira Kawabata, Saku Sugawara

SafeMCP: Proactive Power Regulation for LLM Agent Defense via Environment-Grounded Look-Ahead Reasoning

Lichao Wang, ZhaoXing Ren, Tianzhuo Yang, Jiaming Ji, Chi Harold Liu

XOXO: Stealthy Cross-Origin Context Poisoning Attacks against AI Coding Assistants

Adam Storek, Mukur Gupta, Noopur Bhatt, Aditya Gupta, Janie Kim

The Confidence Dichotomy: Analyzing and Mitigating Miscalibration in Tool-Use Agents

Weihao Xuan, Qingcheng Zeng, Heli Qi, Yunze Xiao, Junjue Wang

Protecting Language Models Against Unauthorized Distillation through Trace Rewriting

Xinhang Ma, William Yeoh, Ning Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Beyond Pedagogical Principles: Multi-Horizon Preference Optimization for Efficient Socratic Tutoring

Xin Shi, Chao Zhang, Yifan Zhu, Xueqiao Zhang, Yawei Luo

Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning

Yubo Wang, Juntian Zhang, Yichen WU, Yankai Lin, Nils Lukas

ProgressLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Jianshu Zhang, Chengxuan Qian, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu, Dingcheng Wang

PIAST: Rapid Prompting with In-context Augmentation for Scarce Training data

Paweł Batorski, Paul Swoboda

DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs

Wenzhuo Xu, Zhipeng Wei, Zonghao Ying, Deyue Zhang, Dongdong Yang

Sherry: Hardware-Efficient 1.25-Bit Ternary Quantization via Fine-grained Sparsification

Hong Huang, Decheng Wu, Qiangqiang Hu, Guanghua Yu, Jinhai Yang

CoQuIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Quality-Aware Information Retrieval

Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Shaobo Cui, Qing Li, Liangwei Chen

Vector Calligrapher: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics via Structured Linguistic Supervision

Bo Zhou, Xikang Chen, Yan Gong, Yin Zhang

Question Difficulty Estimation for Large Language Models via Answer Plausibility Scoring

Jamshid Mozafari, Bhawna Piryani, Adam Jatowt

CreditDecoding: Accelerating Parallel Decoding in Diffusion Large Language Models with Trace Credit

Kangyu Wang, Zhiyun Jiang, Haibo Feng, Weijia Zhao, Lin Liu

Towards Mitigating Modality Bias in Vision-Language Models for Temporal Action Localization

Jiaqi Li, Guangming Wang, Shuntian Zheng, Minzhe Ni, Xiaoman Lu

Limited Linguistic Diversity in Embodied AI Datasets

Selma Liliane Wanna, Agnes Luhtaru, Jonathan Salfity, Ryan Barron, Juston Moore

Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data

Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li

Learning from Evolving Training Dynamics: An Entropy-Maximizing Data Curation Strategy for LLM Supervised Post-Training

Mengxiang Zhang, Lingyuan Liu

Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning

Qiao Liang, Yuke Zhu, Chao Ge, Lei Yang, Ying Shen

Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data

FengXian Dong, Zhi Zheng, Xiao Han, Wei Chen, Jingqing Ruan

Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics

Li Li, Chenxiao Yu, Zhiyu Ni, Hao Li, Charith Peris

Learning from Contrasts: Synthesizing Reasoning Paths from Diverse Search Trajectories

Peiyang Liu, Zhirui Chen, Xi Wang, Di Liang, Youru Li

CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels

Xing Ma, Yangjie Zhou, Wu Sun, Zihan Liu, Jingwen Leng

ODUTQA-MDC: A Task for Open-Domain Underspecified Tabular QA with Multi-turn Dialogue-based Clarification

Zhensheng Wang, ZhanTeng Lin, Wenmian Yang, Kun Zhou, Yiquan Zhang

Valid Survey Simulations with Limited Human Data: The Roles of Prompting, Fine-Tuning, and Rectification

Stefan Krsteski, Giuseppe Russo, Serina Chang, Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

Sycophants in the Courtroom: Are LLMs Fragile to Juridical Authority and Evolving Legal Standards?

Lorenzo Molfetta, Alessio Cocchieri, Luca Ragazzi, Ilaria Bartolini, Marco Patella

How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study

Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li

Critical-CoT: A Robust Defense Framework against Reasoning-Level Backdoor Attacks in Large Language Models

Vu Tuan Truong, Long Bao Le

EchoVLM: Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Model for Universal Ultrasound Intelligence

Chaoyin She, Ruifang Lu, Lida Chen, Wei Wang, Qinghua Huang

Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models’ Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores

Congren Dai, Yue Yang, Krinos Li, Huichi Zhou, Shijie Liang

All That Glisters Is Not Gold: A Benchmark for Reference-Free Counterfactual Financial Misinformation Detection

Yuechen Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Yupeng Cao, Yueru He, Ziyang Xu

GRASPrune: Global Gating for Budgeted Structured Pruning of Large Language Models

Ziyang Wang, Jiangfeng Xiao, Chuan Xiao, Ruoxiang LI, Rui Mao

Visual Self-Fulfilling Alignment: Shaping Safety-Oriented Personas via Threat-Related Images

Qishun Yang, Shu Yang, Lijie Hu, Di Wang

Reasoning with Ontology Graph: Toward Type-Constrained Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Yongxue Shan, Jie Peng, Zixuan Dong, Fei Hu, Xiaodong Wang

Beyond Word Boundaries: A Hebrew Coreference Benchmark and an Evaluation Protocol for Morphologically Complex Text

Refael Shaked Greenfeld, Reut Tsarfaty

Jakiro: Boosting Speculative Decoding via Decoupled MoE

Haiduo Huang, Fuwei Yang, Zhenhua Liu, Pengju Ren

InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Junyou Su, He Zhu, Xiao Luo, Liyu Zhang, Hong-Yu Zhou

Visual and Memory–Augmented Soccer Commentary Generation

Haoran Sun, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn, Kiyoaki Shirai

Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation

Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao

Masked by Consensus: Disentangling Privileged Knowledge in LLM Correctness

Tomer Ashuach, Shai Gretz, Yoav Katz, Yonatan Belinkov, Liat Ein-Dor

Distilling Large Embeddings via Hyperspherical Householder Quantization

Yihang Wang, Bin Wu, Yueyang Su, Tianfu Zhang, Yiqi Du

From Experts to Bases: Orthogonal Subspace Mixture for Continual Multimodal Instruction Tuning

Pei Chen, Xilai Wang, Shiqixu, Zejian Li, Lingyun Sun

Beyond Single-View Detection: A Dual-Space Reasoning Framework for Interpretable Harmful Meme Understanding

Wenqing Hou, Hongkui Tu, Ye Wang, Yue Zhang, Yuying Liu

Mind the (DH) Gap! A Contrast in Risky Choices Between Reasoning and Conversational LLMs

Luise Ge, Yongyan Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

When Agents Look the Same: Quantifying Distillation-Induced Similarity in Tool-Use Behaviors

Chenghao Yang, Yuning Zhang, Zhoufutu Wen, Tao Gong, Jiaheng Liu

Where and What: Reasoning Dynamic and Implicit Preferences in Situated Conversational Recommendation

Dongding Lin, Jian Wang, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li

MuSe: Multi-Stage Graph Reasoning via Vision-Language Models

Guanyu Wang, Xu Chu, Zhijie Tan, Xinrong Chen, Tong Mo

From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation

Kaiwen Wei, Kejun He, Xiaomian Kang, Jie Zhang, Ymyang

OCR-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory

Jinze Li, Yang Zhang, Xin Yang, Jiayi QU, Jinfeng Xu

FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining

Xiquan Li, Xuenan Xu, Ziyang Ma, Wenxi Chen, Haolin He

When Morphology Hides in Plain Sight: Breaking the Isolation in Vietnamese and Beyond

Anh Trac Duc Dinh, Khang Hoang Nhat Vo, Tai Tien Ta, Vinh Cong Doan, Tho Quan

Ready Jurist One: Benchmarking Language Agents for Legal Intelligence in Dynamic Environments

Zheng Jia, Shengbin Yue, Wei Chen, Siyuan Wang, Yidong Liu

An Exploration of Mamba for Speech Self-Supervised Models

Tzu-Quan Lin, Heng-Cheng Kuo, Tzu-Chieh Wei, Hsi-Chun Cheng, Chun Wei Chen

M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation

Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao

Scaling External Knowledge Input Beyond Context Windows of LLMs via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Zijun Liu, Zhennan Wan, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Fei Huang

Reinforcing Agentic Search Via Reward Density Optimization

Kun Luo, Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Ziyi Xia, Shitao Xiao

GKnow: Measuring the Entanglement of Gender Bias and Factual Gender

Leonor Veloso, Hinrich Schuetze

Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time

Jian Mu, Qixin Zhang, Zhiyong Wang, Menglin Yang, Shuang Qiu

Every Token Counts: Generalizing 16M Ultra-Long Context in Large Language Models

Xiang Hu, Zhanchao Zhou, Ruiqi Liang, Zehuan Li, Wei Wu

SGT: Securing Open-Source LLMs Against Malicious Fine-tuning via Safety Guidance Trigger

SungUk Shin, Fangzhao Wu, Byung-Jun Lee, Meeyoung Cha, Sungwon Park

Feeling Rules in Language Models: Mapping Norms of Emotional Appropriateness Across Roles, Institutions, and Intensity

Guangrui Fan, Dandan Liu, Aznul Qalid MD Sabri, Rui Zhang, Pan Lihu

Do LLMs Capture Embodied Cognition and Cultural Variation? Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Demonstratives

Yu Wang, Emmanuele Chersoni, Chu-Ren Huang

MT3: A Synergistic Multi-Task RL Framework for Specializing MLLMs in Text Image Machine Translation

Zhaopeng Feng, Yupu Liang, Shaosheng Cao, Jiayuan Su, Jiahan Ren

VoxMind: An End-to-End Agentic Spoken Dialogue System

Tianle Liang, Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yijun Chen, Zhiyang Jia

PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice

Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran Hu, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran

ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injection

Hengyu An, Minxi Li, Jinghuai Zhang, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Tingchao Fu, Wenkai Wang, Fanxiao Li, Huadong Zhang, Jinhong Zhang

CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning

Biao Yi, Tiansheng Huang, Baolei Zhang, Tong Li, Lihai Nie

Think in Latent Thoughts: A New Paradigm for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

Yiyang Jiang, Li Zhang, Xiao-Yong Wei, Li Qing

A Layer-wise Analysis of Supervised Fine-Tuning

Qinghua Zhao, Xueling Gong, Xinyu Chen, Zhongfeng Kang, Xinlu Li

Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text

Zhihao Xu, Rumei Li, Jiahuan Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang

SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models

Ming Chen, Wenyao Li, Chao Liang, Shi Gu, Peng Lin