ACL 2026

2,650 papers

From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models

Farima Fatahi Bayat, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Estevam Hruschka

Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment

Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi

A Survey of Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Progress and Challenges

Yiyang Wei, Tingyu Song, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao

VeriTaS: The First Dynamic Benchmark for Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking

Mark Rothermel, Marcus Kornmann, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach

Measuring User’s Mental Models of Speech Translation in Human-AI Collaboration

HyoJung Han, Nishant Balepur, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Marine Carpuat

Success and Cost Elicit Convention Formation for Efficient Communication

Saujas Vaduguru, Yilun Hua, Yoav Artzi, Daniel Fried

RealChart2Code: Bridging the Gap in Real-World Chart-to-Code Generation via Multi-Task Evaluation

Jiajun Zhang, Yuying Li, Zhixun Li, Xingyu Guo, Jingzhuo Wu

From Nodes to Narratives: Explaining Graph Neural Networks with LLMs and Graph Context

Peyman Baghershahi, Gregoire Fournier, Pranav Nyati, Sourav Medya

Wait! There’s a Way Out: A Decision Mechanism for Forecasting Conversational Derailment

Laerdon Kim, Vivian Nguyen, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil

LLM4Cell: Taxonomy and Evaluation of LLM and Agentic Models for Single-Cell Biology

Sajib Acharjee Dip, Adrika Zafor, Bikash Kumar Paul, Uddip Acharjee Shuvo, Muhit Islam Emon

Mechanisms of Prompt-Induced Hallucination in Vision–Language Models

William Rudman, Michal Golovanevsky, Dana Arad, Yonatan Belinkov, Carsten Eickhoff

Prosody as Supervision: Bridging the Non-Verbal–Verbal for Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition

Girish, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar, Muskaan Singh

On the Effect of Hyperparameters in Language Modeling for Computational Linguistics

Ruoxi Ning, Yongpeng Zhu, Qingcheng Zeng, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Freda Shi

TagSpeech: End-to-End Multi-Speaker ASR and Diarization with Fine-Grained Temporal Grounding

Mingyue Huo, Yiwen Shao, Yuheng Zhang

Failure Modes in Multi-Hop QA: The Weakest Link Effect and the Recognition Bottleneck

Meiru Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng, Nigel Collier

When in Doubt, Consult: Expert Debate for Sexism Detection via Confidence-Based Routing

Anwar Alajmi, Gabriele Pergola

Lightweight and Faithful Visual Condition Checking in Behavior Trees via Expert-Regularized Reinforcement Learning

Hyosik Moon, Eldan Cohen

Social Story Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Narrative Intent and Reception

Joel Mire, Maria Antoniak, Steven R Wilson, Zexin Ma, Achyutarama R Ganti

Where Paths Split: Localized, Calibrated Control of Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

Chenchen Yuan, Zheyu Zhang, Gjergji Kasneci

Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning in Large Language Models: A Formal Language Learning Perspective

Bishwamittra Ghosh, Soumi Das, Till Speicher, Qinyuan Wu, Mohammad Aflah Khan

Incomplete In-context Learning

wenqiang wang, Wen Yujia, Yan Xiao, zhifeng Chen, Yangshijie Zhang

Who Plays Which Role When? Communication Role Dynamics for Peer Recognition and Team Performance Prediction

Yifan Song, Wenxuan Wendy Shi, Brian Bailey, Tal August

Anchoring the Affective Manifold: Learning Canonical and Disentangled Representations via Generative Cross-Modal Alignment

Weibin Li, Jintao Cheng, Xiaoyu Tang, Chi Man Vong

Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

Yiming Ni, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jiayu Li, Wei Cheng

Survey Response Generation: Generating Closed-Ended Survey Responses In-Silico with Large Language Models

Georg Ahnert, Anna-Carolina Haensch, Barbara Plank, Markus Strohmaier

The Pitfalls of KV Cache Compression

Alex Chen, Renato Geh, Aditya Grover, Guy Van den Broeck, Daniel Mingyi Israel

CIS-BWE: Chaos-Informed Speech Bandwidth Extension

Tarikul Islam Tamiti, Tonmoy Das, Nursadul Mamun, Anomadarshi Barua

Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models

Binghai Wang, Yantao Liu, YuXuan Liu, Tianyi Tang, Shenzhi Wang

Linear-Time and Constant-Memory Text Embeddings Based on Recurrent Language Models

Tobias Grantner, Emanuel Sallinger, Martin Flechl

Paramanu: Compact and Competitive Monolingual Language Models for Low-Resource Morphologically Rich Indian Languages

Mitodru Niyogi, Eric Gaussier, Arnab Bhattacharya

From log 𝜋 to 𝜋: Taming Divergence in Soft Clipping via Bilateral Decoupled Decay of Probability Gradient Weight

Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Chaowen Hu, Cong Qin

SafeMT: Multi-turn Safety for Multimodal Language Models

Han Zhu, Juntao Dai, Jiaming Ji, Haoran Li, Chengkun Cai

Towards A Scanpath-Conditioned Surprisal Theory: Modeling Reader Information States

Michael Mooney, Edmond S. L. Ho

MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning

Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Binbin Zheng, Chaowen Hu

Long-Context Reasoning Through Proxy-Based Chain-of-Thought Tuning

Miao Li, Irina Saparina, Alexander Gurung, Mirella Lapata

Quantifying the Impact of Translation Errors on Multilingual LLM Evaluation

Klaudia Thellmann, Bernhard Stadler, Michael Färber, Jens Lehmann

Multimodal Safety Evaluation in Generative Agent Social Simulations

Alhim Adonai Vera Gonzalez, Carlos Hinojosa, Karen Sanchez, Haidar Bin Hamid, Donghoon Kim

Modeling Annotator Disagreement with Demographic-Aware Experts and Synthetic Perspectives

Yinuo Xu, Veronica Derricks, Allison Earl, David Jurgens

LASA: Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment at the Semantic Bottleneck for LLM Safety

Junxiao Yang, Haoran Liu, Jinzhe Tu, Jiale Cheng, Zhexin Zhang

One Pair Suffices: Unlocking Universal Zero-Shot Translation via Cross-Architecture Alignment

Hao Zong, Cong Hu Yuan, Chao Bei, Wentao Chen, Huan Liu

Temporal Precision Matters: Brain-Tuning Speech Language Models with Millisecond-Resolution Neural Signals

Zhejun Zhang, Wenqing Zhou, Haozhe Xu, Lin Zhang, Lei Li

Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks

Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang

Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation

Fangda Ye, Kuicai Dong, Xie Zhifei, Yuxin Hu, Yihang Yin

From Competition to Synergy: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for Subject-Driven Image Generation

Ziwei Huang, Ying Shu, Fanghao, Quanyu Long, Wenya Wang

The Visual Iconicity Challenge: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Sign Language Form–Meaning Mapping

Onur Keles, Asli Ozyurek, Gerardo Ortega, Kadir Gökgöz, Esam Ghaleb

ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents

Tianjian Liu, Fanqi Wan, Jiajian Guo, Xiaojun Quan

LLM Beliefs Are in Their Heads

Alessandro Corona Mendozza, Anders Søgaard

Beyond Static Alignment: Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence in Semi-Supervised Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Huicong Li, Xiangbo Ji, Wei Wu

Learning to Conceal Risk: Controllable Multi-turn Red Teaming for LLMs in the Financial Domain

Gang Cheng, Haibo Jin, Wenbin Zhang, Haohan Wang, Jun Zhuang

Still Between Us? Evaluating and Improving Voice Assistant Robustness to Third-Party Interruptions

Dongwook Lee, Eunwoo Song, Che Hyun Lee, Heeseung Kim, Sungroh Yoon

GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing

Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen

Edit-Aware Reward Modeling for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Yilin Li, Xiaojun Wan

FedMental: Evaluating Federated Learning for Mental Health Detection from Social Media Data

Nuredin Ali Abdelkadir, Anjali Ratnam, Zeerak Talat, Stevie Chancellor

Amadeus: Autoregressive Model with Bidirectional Attribute Modelling for Symbolic Music

Hongju Su, Ke Li, Lan Yang, Honggang Zhang, Yi-Zhe Song

Thinking in Schemas: Robust Syllogistic Reasoning in LLMs

Federico Ranaldi, Leonardo Ranaldi, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Shay B Cohen

CNSL-bench: Benchmarking the Sign Language Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs on Chinese National Sign Language

Rui Zhao, Xuewen Zhong, Xiaoyun Zheng, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen

Retrieval-Augmented Defense: Adaptive and Controllable Jailbreak Prevention for Large Language Models

Guangyu Yang, Jinghong Chen, Jingbiao Mei, Weizhe Lin, Bill Byrne

Mind Reader: Latent User Demand-Guided Content Optimization for Generative Search Engine

Tong Chen, Jiawei Guo, Yuxi Li, Baiming Chen, Houxing Ren

HarDBench: A Benchmark for Draft-Based Co-Authoring Jailbreak Attacks for Safe Human–LLM Collaborative Writing

EunTae Kim, Soomin Han, Buru Chang

Mem-Gallery: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Conversational Memory for MLLM Agents

Yuanchen Bei, Tianxin Wei, Xuying Ning, Yanjun Zhao, Zhining Liu

Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains

Zhonghang Yuan, Zhefan Wang, Fang Hu, Zihong Chen, Jinzhe Li

VISTA: Verification In Sequential Turn-based Assessment

Ashley Lewis, Andrew Perrault, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Michael White

From Selection to Refinement: Iterative Optimization for Instruction Data

Hang Hu, Ziyan Liu, Rujie Wen, Ruihui Hou, Xueyan Wu

M3-VQA: A Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Entity, Multi-Hop Visual Question Answering

Jiatong Ma, Longteng Guo, Yuchen Liu, Zijia Zhao, Dongze Hao

Tiny Scales, Great Challenges: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Scale Recognition

Jihang Jin, Ronghao Chen, Hao Zhang, Ziyan Liu, Huacan Wang

CAR-bench: Evaluating the Consistency and Limit-Awareness of LLM Agents under Real-World Uncertainty

Johannes Kirmayr, Lukas Stappen, Elisabeth Andre

Rendering Data Unlearnable by Exploiting LLM Alignment Mechanisms

Ruihan Zhang, Jun Sun

SemCSE-Multi: Multifaceted and Decodable Embeddings for Aspect-Specific and Interpretable Scientific Domain Mapping

Marc Brinner, Sina Zarrieß

GeoRC: A Benchmark for Geolocation Reasoning Chains

Mohit Talreja, Joshua Diao, Jim James, Radu Casapu, Tejas Santanam

CAP: Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning in LLMs

Zhaokun Wang, Jinyu Guo, Jingwen Pu, Hongli Pu, Meng Yang

DimABSA: Building Multilingual and Multidomain Datasets for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Lung-Hao Lee, Liang-Chih Yu, Natalia V Loukachevitch, Ilseyar Alimova, Alexander Panchenko

Robust Tool Use via Fission-GRPO: Learning to Recover from Execution Errors

Zhiwei Zhang, Fei Zhao, Rui Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang

MirrorQA: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Mirror-Orientation Reasoning

Jingping Liu, Xingchen Peng, Yan Zhou, Ziyan Liu, Jie Zhai

Scaling Reasoning, Losing Control: Evaluating Instruction Following in Large Reasoning Models

Tingchen Fu, Yafu Li, Jiawei Gu, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng

BOSCH: Black-Box Binary Optimization for Short-Context Attention-Head Selection in LLMs

Abbas Ghaddar, Ivan Kobyzev, Boxing Chen, Yufei CUI

LongVideoAgent: Multi-Agent Reasoning with Long Videos

Runtao Liu, Ziyi Liu, Jiaqi Tang, Yue Ma, Renjie Pi

Emotion-Wheel-Guided Audio-Referred Text Representation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Eunseon Seong, Harim Lee, Dahye Kim, ChangHyun Kim, Dong-Kyu Chae

GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap

Farzad Shami, Subhrasankha Dey, Nico Van de Weghe, Henrikki Tenkanen

Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Factual Queries

Miao Xie, Xiao Zhang, Yi Li, Chunli Lv

Phonemes to the Rescue: Multilingual Tokenization Based on International Phonetic Alphabet

Milan Miletić, Julie Kallini, Ekaterina Shutova

MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images

Jiayi Tuo, Cheng Tang, Zihan Wang, Chenyue Zhou, Yao Li

E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence

Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao

Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

TAIGR: Towards Modeling Influencer Content on Social Media via Structured, Pragmatic Inference

Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri, Eylon Caplan, Rajkumar Pujari, Dan Goldwasser

UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning

Mutian Bao, Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou

From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan

Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang

Quantifying and Mitigating Socially Desirable Responding in LLMs: A Desirability-Matched Graded Forced-Choice Psychometric Study

Kensuke Okada, Yui Furukawa, Kyosuke Bunji

AdaMix: Adaptive Mixing for Short and Long Reasoning Adapters

Hao Luo, Xiao Yan, Xinyan Li, Qiming Zeng, Yuhao Lin

On-the-Fly VLA Adaptation via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Changyu Liu, Yiyang Liu, Taowen Wang, Qiao Zhuang, James Chenhao Liang

Learning Uncertainty from Sequential Internal Dispersion in Large Language Models

Ponhvoan Srey, Xiaobao Wu, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu

Textual Steering Vectors Can Improve Visual Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models

Woody Haosheng Gan, Deqing Fu, Julian Asilis, Ollie Liu, Vatsal Sharan

Assessing the Belief Consistency of Large Language Models on the Logical Conversation Process

Tomoki Tsujimura, Matīss Rikters, Masaki Asada, Shusaku Egami, Tatsuya Ishigaki

GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang

KASER: Knowledge-Aligned Student Error Simulator for Open-Ended Coding Tasks

Zhangqi Duan, Nigel Fernandez, Andrew Lan

Measuring Social Bias in Vision-Language Models with Face-Only Counterfactuals from Real Photos

Haodong Chen, Qiang Huang, Jiaqi Zhao, Qiuping Jiang, Xiaojun Chang

Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression

Zhong-Zhi Li, Xiao Liang, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang

HiEdit: Lifelong Model Editing with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Yangfan Wang, Tianyang Sun, Chen Tang, Jie Liu, Wei Cai

Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models under Microscaling Floating Point Formats

Manyi Zhang, Ji-Fu Li, Zhongao Sun, Haoli Bai, Hui-Ling Zhen

Market-Bench: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Economic and Trade Competition

Yushuo Zheng, Huiyu Duan, Zicheng Zhang, Yucheng Zhu, Xiongkuo Min

Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching

Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang