China

Instruction tuning (IT) improves large language models (LLMs) by aligning their outputs with human instructions, but its success depends critically on training data quality, and datasets such as Alpaca often contain noisy or suboptimal examples that undermine fine‑tuning. Prior selection strategies score samples using general‑purpose LLMs (e.g., GPT), leveraging their strong language understanding yet introducing inherent biases that misalign with the target model’s behavior and yield unstable downstream performance. Influence‑based methods address this by estimating each example’s marginal contribution to overall performance, but they typically assume additive contributions and therefore overlook higher‑order interactions among samples. To overcome these limitations, we propose JI²S, a novel framework that jointly models both marginal and combinatorial influences within sample groups. Applying JI²S to select the top 1,000 most influential examples from Alpaca, we fine‑tune LLaMA2‑7B, Mistral‑7B, and LLaMA2‑13B and evaluate them on Open LLM Benchmarks, MT‑Bench, and GPT‑4–judged pairwise comparisons. Our experiments show that JI²S consistently outperforms full‑dataset training and strong baselines, highlighting the value of capturing joint influence for high‑quality instruction fine‑tuning. We provide our code in this \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Joint-influence-Instruction-Selection-0E3D}{GitHub repository}.

EMNLP 2025

JI²S: Joint Influence‑Aware Instruction Data Selection for Efficient Fine‑Tuning

joint influence

data influence

data selection

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Recent advancements in large video-language models have revolutionized video understanding tasks. However, their efficiency is significantly constrained by processing high volumes of visual tokens. Existing token compression strategies apply a fixed compression ratio, ignoring the variability in semantic density among different video clips. Consequently, this lead to inadequate representation of information-rich clips due to insufficient tokens and unnecessary computation on static or content-poor ones. To address this, we propose LangDC, a Language-aware Dynamic Token Compressor. LangDC leverages a lightweight language model to describe video clips, converting them into soft caption tokens as visual representations. Trained with our proposed semantic density-aware supervision, LangDC aims to 1) cover key visual cues necessary for downstream task reasoning and 2) dynamically adjust compression ratios based on scene richness, reflected by descriptions length. Our design mimics how humans dynamically express what they see: complex scenes (seeing more) elicit more detailed language to convey nuances (saying more), whereas simpler scenes are described with fewer words. Experimental results show that our method reduces FLOPs by 49% compared to VideoGPT+ while maintaining competitive performance. Furthermore, qualitative results demonstrate our approach adaptively adjusts the token compression ratio based on video segment richness. Code will be released once acceptance.

Seeing More, Saying More: Lightweight Language Experts are Dynamic Video Token Compressors

Current Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) research follows a closed-domain assumption. However, there is no clear consensus on emotion classification in psychology, which presents a challenge for models when it comes to recognizing previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (UERC) task for the first time and propose **EmoTrans**, a solid prototype-based emotion transfer framework. This prototype-based approach shows promise but still faces key challenges: First, implicit expressions complicate emotion definition, which we address by proposing an LLM-enhanced description approach. Second, utterance encoding in long conversations is difficult, which we tackle with a proposed parameter-free mechanism for efficient encoding and overfitting prevention. Finally, the Markovian flow nature of emotions is hard to transfer, which we address with an improved Attention Viterbi Decoding (AVD) method to transfer seen emotion transitions to unseen emotions. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our method serves as a strong baseline for preliminary exploration in this new area.

Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Understanding the vulnerabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to jailbreak attacks is essential for their responsible real-world deployment. Most previous work requires access to model gradients, or is based on human knowledge (prompt engineering) to complete jailbreak, and they hardly consider the interaction of images and text, resulting in inability to jailbreak in black box scenarios or poor performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for toxicity maximization, referred to as PBI-Attack. Our method begins by extracting malicious features from a harmful corpus using an alternative LVLM and embedding these features into a benign image as prior information. Subsequently, we enhance these features through bidirectional cross-modal interaction optimization, which iteratively optimizes the bimodal perturbations in an alternating manner through greedy search, aiming to maximize the toxicity of the generated response. The toxicity level is quantified using a well-trained evaluation model. Experiments demonstrate that PBI-Attack outperforms previous state-of-the-art jailbreak methods, achieving an average attack success rate of 92.5% across three open-source LVLMs and around 67.3% on three closed-source LVLMs. Disclaimer: This paper contains potentially disturbing and offensive content.

PBI-Attack: Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for Toxicity Maximization

Text-to-speech (TTS) has advanced from generating natural-sounding speech to enabling fine-grained control over attributes like emotion, timbre, and style. Driven by rising industrial demand and breakthroughs in deep learning, e.g., diffusion and large language models (LLMs), controllable TTS has become a rapidly growing research area. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of controllable TTS methods, from traditional control techniques to emerging approaches using natural language prompts. We categorize model architectures, control strategies, and feature representations, while also summarizing challenges, datasets, and evaluations in controllable TTS. This survey aims to guide researchers and practitioners by offering a clear taxonomy and highlighting future directions in this fast-evolving field.

Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey

In large language models (LLMs), certain neurons can store distinct pieces of knowledge learned during pretraining. While factual knowledge typically appears as a combination of relations and entities, it remains unclear whether some neurons focus on a relation itself -- independent of any entity. We hypothesize such neurons detect a relation in the input text and guide generation involving such a relation. To investigate this, we study the LLama-2 family on a chosen set of relations, with a statistics-based method. Our experiments demonstrate the existence of relation-specific neurons. We measure the effect of selectively deactivating candidate neurons specific to relation r on the LLM's ability to handle (1) facts involving relation r and (2) facts involving a different relation r' neq r. With respect to their capacity for encoding relation information, we give evidence for the following three properties of relation-specific neurons. textbf(i) Neuron cumulativity. Multiple neurons jointly contribute to processing facts involving relation r, with no single neuron fully encoding a fact in r on its own. textbf(ii) Neuron versatility. Neurons can be shared across multiple closely related as well as less related relations. In addition, some relation neurons transfer across languages. textbf(iii) Neuron interference. Deactivating neurons specific to one relation can improve LLMs' factual recall performance for facts of other relations.

On Relation-Specific Neurons in Large Language Models

Estimating the difficulty of input questions as perceived by large language models (LLMs) is essential for accurate performance evaluation and adaptive inference. Existing methods typically rely on repeated response sampling, auxiliary models, or fine-tuning the target model itself, which may incur substantial computational costs or compromise generality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for difficulty estimation that leverages only the hidden representations produced by the target LLM. We model the token-level generation process as a Markov chain and define a value function to estimate the expected output quality given any hidden state. This allows for efficient and accurate difficulty estimation based solely on the initial hidden state, without generating any output tokens. Extensive experiments across both textual and multimodal tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in difficulty estimation. Moreover, we apply our difficulty estimates to guide adaptive reasoning strategies, including Self-Consistency, Best-of-N, and Self-Refine, achieving higher inference efficiency with fewer generated tokens.

The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations

This paper introduces LingGym, a new benchmark that evaluates LLMs’ capacity for meta-linguistic reasoning using Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) and grammatical descriptions extracted from 18 typologically diverse reference grammars. Unlike previous work that focuses on specific downstream tasks, we assess whether LLMs can generalize linguistic inference across low-resource languages and structures not seen during training. We present a controlled evaluation task: Morpheme-Gloss Inference, in which the model must infer a missing morpheme and gloss from context using varying levels of linguistic information (e.g., glosses, grammatical explanations, translations). Our results show that incorporating structured linguistic cues leads to consistent improvements in reasoning performance across all models. This work highlights both the promise and current limitations of using LLMs for typologically informed linguistic analysis and low-resource language documentation.

LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly integrate into everyday workflows, where users shape outcomes through multi-turn collaboration, a critical question emerges: do users with different personality traits systematically prefer certain LLMs over others? We conducted a study with 32 participants evenly distributed across four Keirsey personality types, evaluating their interactions with GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 across four collaborative tasks: data analysis, creative writing, information retrieval, and writing assistance. Results revealed significant personality-driven preferences: *Rationals* strongly preferred GPT-4, particularly for goal-oriented tasks, while *Idealists* favored Claude 3.5, especially for creative and analytical tasks. Other personality types showed task-dependent preferences. Sentiment analysis of qualitative feedback confirmed these patterns. Notably, aggregate helpfulness ratings were similar across models, showing how personality-based analysis reveals LLM differences that traditional evaluations miss.

Personality Matters: User Traits Predict LLM Preferences in Multi-Turn Collaborative Tasks

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks by leveraging increased test-time computation and exhibiting behaviors reminiscent of human-like self-reflection. While LRMs show a clear capacity for valuable self-reflection, how this ability interacts with other model behaviors remains underexplored. We investigate this connection by analyzing verbalized confidence, how models articulate their certainty, as a lens into the nature of self-reflection in LRMs. We find that supervised fine-tuning on reasoning traces (i.e., distillation) and reinforcement learning can improve verbalized calibration in reasoning-intensive settings in a progressive, laddered fashion. However, our results also indicate that reasoning models may possess a diminished awareness of their own knowledge boundaries, as evidenced by significantly lower "I don't know" response rates on factuality benchmarks. Moreover, we examine the relationship between verbalized confidence and reasoning chains, finding that models tend to express higher confidence when providing shorter or less elaborate reasoning. Our findings highlight how reasoning-oriented training can enhance performance in reasoning-centric tasks while potentially incurring a reasoning tax, a cost reflected in the model's reduced ability to accurately recognize the limits of its own knowledge in small-scale models. More broadly, our work showcases how this erosion of knowledge boundaries can compromise model faithfulness, as models grow more confident without a commensurate understanding of when they should abstain.

Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?

Positional bias (PB), manifesting as non-uniform sensitivity across different contextual locations, significantly impairs long-context comprehension and processing capabilities. While prior work seeks to mitigate PB through modifying the architectures causing its emergence, significant PB still persists. To address PB effectively, we introduce Pos2Distill, a position to position knowledge distillation framework. Pos2Distill transfers the superior capabilities from advantageous positions to less favorable ones, thereby reducing the huge performance gaps. The conceptual principle is to leverage the inherent, position-induced disparity to counteract the PB itself. We identify distinct manifestations of PB under retrieval and reasoning paradigms, thereby designing two specialized instantiations: Pos2Distill-R1 and Pos2Distill-R2 respectively, both grounded in this core principle. By employing the Pos2Distill approach, we achieve enhanced uniformity and significant performance gains across all contextual positions in long-context retrieval and reasoning tasks. Crucially, both specialized systems exhibit strong cross-task generalization mutually, while achieving superior performance on their respective tasks.

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Seeing More, Saying More: Lightweight Language Experts are Dynamic Video Token Compressors

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