Morocco

Reward models are crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences but face two representative challenges. First, traditional discriminative reward models usually concatenate questions and responses directly as input, resulting in low data efficiency. Second, reward models are vulnerable to reward overoptimization. We propose \textbf{PIRA}, a training paradigm addressing these issues through three strategies: (1) Reformulating questionвЂ“answer pairs into preference-based instructions for clearer and more explicit task specification, (2) aggregating rewards from diverse preference tasks to reduce bias and improve robustness, and (3) averaging value-head outputs under varying dropout rates to stabilize rewards. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of PIRA.

EACL 2026

PIRA: Preference-Oriented Instruction-Tuned Reward Models with Dual Aggregation

rlhf

large language model

reward model

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit political biases, which creates a risk of undue influence on LLM users and public opinion. Yet despite LLMs being used across the world, there is little evidence on how political biases vary across languages. And despite a growing number of frontier LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek) released by non-U.S. organizations, there is limited understanding of how political biases vary across LLMs developed in different political contexts. To address these gaps, we measure LLM bias on U.S.- and China-related issues, and how bias varies by 1) prompt language (English vs. Chinese) and 2) model origin (U.S. vs. Chinese). For this purpose, we create a new parallel dataset of 36k realistic test prompts asking models to write about a balanced set of 60 political issues sourced from national U.S. and Chinese news outlets. Using this dataset, we show that both model origin and prompt language systematically influence bias. Language effects dominate on China-related issues, particularly those involving sovereignty and human rights, while model origin effects are more pronounced on U.S.-related governance and foreign policy topics. Overall, our results highlight a need for language and context-specific measurement of LLM political bias.

Bias in the East, Bias in the West: A Bilingual Analysis of LLM Political Bias on U.S.- and China-Related Issues

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated data annotation, yet reliance on expensive commercial models like GPT-4 limits accessibility. This paper rigorously evaluates the potential of open-source smaller LLMs (sLLMs) as a cost-effective alternative. We introduce a new
benchmark dataset, Multidisciplinary Open Research Data (MORD), comprising 12,277 annotated sentence segments from 1,500 scholarly articles across five research domains, to systematically assess sLLM performance. We further
propose to build the Crowd of LLMs, which aggregates annotations from multiple sLLMs using label aggregation algorithms. This approach not only outperforms individual sLLMs but also reveals that combining sLLM annotations with human crowd labels yields superior results compared to either method alone. Our findings highlight the viability of sLLMs for de-ocratizing high-quality data annotation while
underscoring the need for tailored aggregation methods to fully realize their potential.

Aggregating Crowd of LLMs for Cost-Effective Data Annotation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer factual, information-seeking questions (ISQs). While prior work often focuses on false, misleading information, little attention has been paid to true but strategically persuasive content that can derail a model’s reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce a new evaluation dataset, TruthTrap, in two languages, i.e., English and Farsi, on Iran-related ISQs, each paired with a correct explanation and a persuasive yet misleading true hint. We then evaluate nine diverse LLMs (spanning proprietary and open-source systems) via factuality classification and multiple-choice QA tasks, finding that accuracy drops by 25%, on average, when models encounter these misleading yet factual hints. Also, the models' predictions match the hint-aligned options up to 77 percent of the time. Notably, models often misjudge such hints in isolation yet still integrate them into final answers. Our results highlight a significant limitation in LLM outputs, underscoring the importance of robust fact-verification and emphasizing real-world risks posed by partial truths in domains like social media, education, and policy-making.

TruthTrap: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Factually Correct Yet Misleading Information in Question Answering

This presentation introduces MADIAVE, a fully zero-shot multi-agent debate framework for implicit attribute value extraction (AVE) in multimodal e-commerce, where multiple MLLM agents iteratively refine predictions by exchanging answers and rationales across rounds. Evaluated on ImplicitAVE (1,610 samples across 5 domains), MADIAVE consistently improves over single-model inference, and under a compute-matched setting, it outperforms majority vote via structured reasoning exchange. Key findings show that 1–2 debate rounds capture most gains (more rounds can drift), low-accuracy attributes benefit most, and a practical default is 2 agents × 2 rounds. 

MADIAVE: Multi-Agent Debate for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many reasoning tasks but struggle with knowledge-intensive queries due to their inability to dynamically access up-to-date or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling LLMs to ground their responses in external sources. However, existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over both the query and source sides, often resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning. In this work, we introduce \textit{\textbf{DeepSieve}}, an agentic RAG framework that incorporates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router. DeepSieve decomposes complex queries into structured sub-questions and recursively routes each to the most suitable knowledge source, filtering irrelevant information through a multi-stage distillation process. Our design emphasizes modularity, transparency, and adaptability, leveraging recent advances in agentic system design. Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional RAG approaches.

DeepSieve: Information Sieving via LLM-as-a-Knowledge-Router

Haptic captioning is the task of generating natural language descriptions from haptic signals, such as vibrations, for use in virtual reality and rehabilitation applications. While previous multimodal research has focused primarily on vision and audio, haptic feedback for the sense of touch remain underexplored. To address this gap, we formalize the haptic captioning task and propose HapticLLaMA, a multimodal sensory language model that interprets vibration signals into descriptions in a given sensory, emotional, or associative category. We investigate two types of haptic tokenizers, a frequency-based tokenizer and an EnCodec-based tokenizer, that convert haptic signals into sequences of discrete units, enabling their integration with the LLaMA model. HapticLLaMA is trained in two stages: (1) supervised fine-tuning using the LLaMA architecture with LoRA-based adaptation, and (2) fine-tuning via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We assess HapticLLaMA's captioning performance using both automated n-gram metrics and human evaluation. HapticLLaMA demonstrates strong capability in interpreting haptic vibration signals, achieving a METEOR score of 59.98 and a BLEU-4 score of 32.06, respectively. Furthermore, over 64% of the generated captions received human ratings above 3.5 on a 7-point scale, with RLHF yielding a 13% improvement in the overall rating distribution, indicating stronger alignment with human haptic perception. These findings highlight the potential of large language models to process and adapt to sensory data.

HapticLLaMA: A Multimodal Sensory Language Model for Haptic Captioning

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in providing trustworthy responses for knowledge-intensive tasks, they still face critical limitations such as hallucinations and outdated knowledge. To address these issues, the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework enhances LLMs with access to external knowledge via a retriever, enabling more accurate and real-time outputs about the latest events. However, this integration brings new security vulnerabilities: the risk that malicious content in the external database can be retrieved and used to manipulate model outputs. Although prior work has explored attacks on RAG systems, existing approaches either rely heavily on access to the retriever or fail to jointly consider both retrieval and generation stages, limiting their effectiveness, particularly in black-box scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Token-level Precise Attack on the RAG (TPARAG), a novel framework that targets both white-box and black-box RAG systems. TPARAG leverages a lightweight white-box LLM as an attacker to generate and iteratively optimize malicious passages at the token level, ensuring both retrievability and high attack success in generation. Extensive experiments on open-domain QA datasets demonstrate that TPARAG consistently outperforms previous approaches in retrieval-stage and end-to-end attack effectiveness. These results further reveal critical vulnerabilities in RAG pipelines and offer new insights into improving their robustness.

Token-Level Precise Attack on RAG: Searching for the Best Alternatives to Mislead Generation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) requires understanding both contextual dependencies and speaker-specific cues. Existing approaches often treat conversation context as a single representation or encode speaker identity shallowly, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained emotional dynamics. We propose PERC, a personality-aware ERC framework that (1) segregates conversational context into intra- and inter-speaker components, (2) models static or dynamic personality traits to represent stable and evolving speaker dispositions, and (3) performs contrastive cross-alignment between intra-intra and inter-inter representations to enforce contextual and personality consistency. Experiments on three ERC benchmarks show that PERC achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving weighted F1 by up to 2.74%, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating context segregation, personality modeling, and contrastive alignment for emotion reasoning in dialogue.

Who You Are, What You Say: Intra- and Inter- Context Personality for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a crucial technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs). Although existing cross-tokenizer KD methods have made notable progress, their effectiveness remains constrained by suboptimal alignment across sequence and vocabulary levels. To address these limitations, we introduce Dual-Space Weighting and Time-Warped Alignment (DWA-KD), a novel cross-tokenizer distillation framework that enhances token-wise distillation through dual-space entropy-based weighting and achieves precise sequence-level alignment by leveraging both lexical and semantic information. At the token level, DWA-KD maps teacher representations into the student space and vice versa, performing dual-space KD via KullbackвЂ“Leibler divergence (KL). The process is modulated by dual-space entropy-based weights that up-weight tokens where the student is uncertain and the teacher is confident, thereby focusing learning on informative tokens rather than treating all positions equally. At the sequence level, DWA-KD applies Soft Dynamic Time Warping (Soft-DTW) to both the embedding and final hidden-state layers, enabling robust alignment of lexical and contextual semantics between teacher and student sequences. Extensive experiments across diverse NLP benchmarks demonstrate that DWA-KD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art KD baselines, while ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of entropy-based token weighting and embedding and final hidden state layer Soft-DTW alignment.

DWA-KD: Dual-Space Weighting and Time-Warped Alignment for Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation

In the tabular domain, which is the predominant data format in real-world applications, anomalies are extremely rare or difficult to collect, as their identification often requires domain expertise. Consequently, evaluating tabular anomaly detection models is challenging, since anomalies may be absent even in evaluation sets. To tackle this challenge, prior works have generated synthetic anomaly generation rely on statistical patterns, they often overlook domain semantics and struggle to reflect the complex, domain-specific nature of real-world anomalies. We propose AutoAnoEval, a novel evaluation framework for tabular AD that constructs pseudo-evaluation sets with semantically grounded synthetic anomalies. Our approach leverages an iterative interaction between a Large Language Model (LLM) and a decision tree (DT): the LLM generates realistic anomaly conditions based on contextual semantics, while the DT provides structural guidance by capturing feature interactions inherent in the tabular data. This iterative loop ensures the generation of diverse anomaly conditions, ranging from easily detectable outliers to subtle cases near the decision boundary. Extensive experiments on 20 tabular AD benchmarks demonstrate that AutoAnoEval achieves superior model selection performance, with high ranking alignment and minimal performance gaps compared to evaluations on anomalies encountered in practical applications.

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Next from EACL 2026

Bias in the East, Bias in the West: A Bilingual Analysis of LLM Political Bias on U.S.- and China-Related Issues

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