Morocco

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with Long Video Understanding (LVU) due to their limited context window and the distributed nature of salient information across many redundant frames. To address this, we present VideoMind, a novel training free framework for LVU designed to mimic a human reasoning process. The framework is orchestrated by an MLLM that breaks down a user&#39;s query into a series of simpler, actionable sub-queries. For each sub query, the MLLM reconfigures itself by invoking specialized `modes&#39; that are instantiations of the same MLLM, but with appropriately tailored context for the given sub query to extract targeted evidence. After gathering this evidence, the model resumes its role as the orchestrator which evaluates the results and decides if an answer is complete or if it must refine its strategy by engaging further modes with new context. Our specialized operational modes include: 1) a Multi-Scale Temporal Search mode to identify and summarize relevant video sub-snippets at varying time scales, and 2) a Single-Frame Visual Detail mode for precise spatial localization of objects. This dynamic allocation of computation yields state-of-the-art results on the Video-MME, LongVideo, and MLVU benchmarks, achieving 77.6% performance on Video MME using Qwen 2.5 72B (4.8% enhancement) while also yielding a 5% improvement on Llama 4 Scout.

EACL 2026

VideoMind: Thinking in Steps for Long Video Understanding

agentic long video understanding

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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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.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with Long Video Understanding (LVU) due to their limited context window and the distributed nature of salient information across many redundant frames. To address this, we present VideoMind, a novel training free framework for LVU designed to mimic a human reasoning process. The framework is orchestrated by an MLLM that breaks down a user's query into a series of simpler, actionable sub-queries. For each sub query, the MLLM reconfigures itself by invoking specialized `modes' that are instantiations of the same MLLM, but with appropriately tailored context for the given sub query to extract targeted evidence. After gathering this evidence, the model resumes its role as the orchestrator which evaluates the results and decides if an answer is complete or if it must refine its strategy by engaging further modes with new context. Our specialized operational modes include: 1) a Multi-Scale Temporal Search mode to identify and summarize relevant video sub-snippets at varying time scales, and 2) a Single-Frame Visual Detail mode for precise spatial localization of objects. This dynamic allocation of computation yields state-of-the-art results on the Video-MME, LongVideo, and MLVU benchmarks, achieving 77.6% performance on Video MME using Qwen 2.5 72B (4.8% enhancement) while also yielding a 5% improvement on Llama 4 Scout.

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. 

Clinical Question-Answering (CQA) industry systems are increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their deployment is often guided by the assumption that domain-specific fine-tuning is essential. Although specialised medical LLMs such as BioBERT, BioGPT, and PubMedBERT remain popular, they face practical limitations including narrow coverage, high retraining costs, and limited adaptability. Efforts based on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) have attempted to address these assumptions but continue to reinforce what we term the SPECIALISATION FALLACY—the belief that specialised medical LLMs are inherently superior for CQA. To address this assumption, we introduce MEDASSESS-X, a deployment-industry-oriented CQA framework that applies alignment at inference time rather than through SFT. MEDASSESS-X uses lightweight steering vectors to guide model activations toward medically consistent reasoning without updating model weights or requiring domain-specific retraining. This inference-time alignment layer stabilises CQA performance across both general-purpose and specialised medical LLMs, thereby resolving the SPECIALISATION FALLACY. Empirically, MEDASSESS-X delivers consistent gains across all LLM families, improving Accuracy by up to +6%, Factual Consistency by +7%, and reducing Safety Error Rate by as much as 50%.

Do Clinical Question Answering Systems Really Need Specialised Medical Fine Tuning?

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization, chunked prefill, and model weight quantization have shown promise, their joint effects and optimal configurations for edge deployment remain underexplored. We introduce KV Pareto, a systems-level framework that systematically maps the trade-off frontier between total memory consumption and task accuracy across these three complementary optimization techniques. Our framework evaluates multiple LLM architectures (Qwen, Llama, Mistral) with varying KV quantization schemes (int2/4/8, mixed-precision), granularities (per-token, per-tensor, per-block), and 4-bit weight quantization via AWQ. Our framework identifies model-specific Pareto-optimal configurations that achieve 68-78\% total memory reduction with minimal (1-3\%) accuracy degradation on long-context tasks. We additionally verify the selected frontiers on additional benchmarks of Needle-in-a-Haystack, GSM8k and MMLU as well as extended context lengths of up to 128k to demonstrate the practical need of joint optimization for efficient LLM inference.

KV Pareto: Systems-Level Optimization of KV Cache and Model Compression for Long Context Inference

We present MizanQA, a benchmark for assessing LLMs on Moroccan legal MCQs, many with multiple correct answers. Covering 1,776 expert-verified questions in Modern Standard Arabic enriched with Moroccan idioms, the dataset reflects influences from Maliki jurisprudence, customary law, and French legal traditions. Unlike single-answer settings, MizanQA features variable option counts, creating added difficulty. We evaluate multilingual and Arabic-centric models in zero-shot, native-Arabic prompts, measuring accuracy, a precision-penalized F1-like score, and calibration errors. Results show large performance gaps and miscalibration, particularly under stricter penalties. By scoping this benchmark to parametric knowledge only, we provide a baseline for future retrieval-augmented and rationale-focused setups.

MizanQA: A Benchmark for Multi-Answer Moroccan Legal QA

Job postings are critical for recruitment, yet large enterprises struggle with standardization and consistency, requiring significant time from hiring managers and recruiters. We present a feedback-aware prompt optimization framework that automates high-quality job posting generation through iterative human-in-the-loop refinement. Our system integrates multiple data sources: job metadata, competencies, organization's compliance guidelines, and organization brand statement, while incorporating human feedback to continuously improve prompt quality through multi-LLM validation. We evaluated our approach using LLM-as-a-judge on 1,056 job postings and human evaluation on a smaller subset across three dimensions: Standardization, Compliance, and User Perception. Our results demonstrate high compliance rates and strong satisfaction scores in both automated and human evaluation, validating the effectiveness of our feedback-aware approach for enterprise job posting generation.

Feedback-Aware Prompt Optimization Framework for Generating Job Postings

Transformers have become the foundational architecture for a broad spectrum of sequence modeling applications, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing, vision, and beyond. However, their theoretical limitations in discrete reasoning tasks, such as arithmetic, logical inference, and algorithmic composition, remain a critical open problem. In this survey, we synthesize recent advances from three theoretical perspectives: circuit complexity, approximation theory, and communication complexity, to clarify the structural and computational barriers that transformers face when performing symbolic computations. By connecting these established theoretical frameworks, we provide an accessible and unified account of why current transformer architectures struggle to implement exact discrete algorithms, even as they excel at pattern matching and interpolation. We review key definitions, seminal results, and illustrative examples, highlighting challenges such as depth constraints, difficulty approximating discontinuities, and bottlenecks in inter-token communication. Finally, we discuss implications for model design and suggest promising directions for overcoming these foundational limitations.

Barriers to Discrete Reasoning with Transformers: A Survey Across Depth, Exactness, and Bandwidth

High-quality instruction-tuning data is crucial for developing Large Language Models (LLMs) that can effectively navigate real-world tasks and follow human instructions. While synthetic data generation offers a scalable approach for creating such datasets, it imposes a quality ceiling where models trained on such data cannot outperform the LLM generating it. To address this limitation, we introduce Reference-Level Feedback, a paradigm that breaks through this limitation by extracting desirable characteristics from carefully curated reference samples to guide the synthesis of new instruction-response pairs. Using this approach, we synthesize REFED, a dataset of 10K instruction-response pairs. Fine-tuning Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct on REFED demonstrate state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized models, notably reaching a 43.96% length-controlled win-rate on AlpacaEval 2.0. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Reference-Level Feedback consistently outperforms traditional sample-level feedback methods, generalizes across model architectures, and produces high-quality and diverse data at low cost.

Beyond Sample-Level Feedback: Using Reference-Level Feedback to Guide Data Synthesis

Standard autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) is inherently short-sighted, often failing to find globally optimal reasoning paths due to its token-by-token generation process. While inference-time strategies like foresight sampling attempt to mitigate this by simulating future steps, they typically rely on ad-hoc heuristics for valuing paths and pruning the search space. This paper introduces Martingale Foresight Sampling (MFS), a principled framework that reformulates LLM decoding as a problem of identifying an optimal stochastic process. By modeling the quality of a reasoning path as a stochastic process, we leverage Martingale theory to design a theoretically-grounded algorithm. Our approach replaces heuristic mechanisms with principles from probability theory: step valuation is derived from the Doob Decomposition Theorem to measure a path's predictable advantage, path selection uses Optional Stopping Theory for principled pruning of suboptimal candidates, and an adaptive stopping rule based on the Martingale Convergence Theorem terminates deliberation once a path's quality has provably converged. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MFS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency.

Martingale Foresight Sampling: A Principled Approach to Inference-Time LLM Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to produce open-ended, interpretive annotations, yet there is no validated, scalable measure of ***idea-level similarity*** to expert annotations. We (i) introduce the content evaluation of LLM annotations as a core, understudied task, (ii) propose IDEAlign for capturing expert similarity judgments via the odd-one-out tasks, and (iii) benchmark various similarity methods, such as text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge, against these human ratings. Applying this approach to two real-world educational datasets (interpreting math reasoning and feedback generation), we find that most metrics fail to capture the nuanced dimensions of similarity meaningful to experts. LLM-as-a-judge performs best (11вЂ“18% improvement over other methods) but still falls short of expert alignment, making it useful as a triage filter rather than a substitute for human review. Our work demonstrates the difficulty of evaluating open-ended LLM annotations at scale, and positions IDEAlign as a reusable protocol for benchmarking on this task, thereby informing responsible deployment of LLMs.

IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Experts

Existing machine learning engineering (MLE) agents struggle to iteratively optimize their implemented algorithms for effectiveness. To address this, we introduce MLE-Ideator, a dual-agent framework that separates ideation from implementation. In our system, an implementation agent can request strategic help from a dedicated Ideator. We show this approach is effective in two ways. First, in a prompting-based setup, our framework significantly outperforms implementation-only agent baselines on MLE-Bench. Second, we demonstrate that the Ideator can be trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to generate more effective ideas. With only 1K training samples from 10 MLE tasks, our RL-trained Qwen3-8B Ideator achieves an 11.5% relative improvement compared to its prompted counterpart and surpasses Claude Sonnet 3.5. These results highlight that enabling LLM agents to learn to ideate offers a promising path toward strategic AI systems for scientific discovery.

Learning to Ideate for Machine Learning Engineering Agents

Are large language models (LLMs) sensitive to the distinction between humanly possible languages and humanly impossible languages? This question is taken by many to bear on whether LLMs and humans share the same innate learning biases. Previous work has attempted to answer it in the positive by comparing LLM learning curves on existing language datasets and on "impossible" datasets derived from them via various perturbation functions. Using the same methodology, we examine this claim on a wider set of languages and impossible perturbations. We find that in most cases, GPT-2 learns each language and its impossible counterpart equally easily, in contrast to previous claims. We also apply a more lenient condition by testing whether GPT-2 provides any kind of separation between the whole set of natural languages and the whole set of impossible languages. By considering cross-linguistic variance in various metrics computed on the perplexity curves, we show that GPT-2 provides no systematic separation between the possible and the impossible. Taken together, these perspectives show that LLMs do not share the human innate biases that shape linguistic typology.

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Do Clinical Question Answering Systems Really Need Specialised Medical Fine Tuning?

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Do Clinical Question Answering Systems Really Need Specialised Medical Fine Tuning?

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Agentic Very Long Video Understanding

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