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Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily constrained by memory and bandwidth bottlenecks during deployment. Although Vector Quantization (VQ) has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups. Moreover, these methods typically suffer from non-negligible performance degradation under ultra-low bitwidth regimes. To bridge this gap, we propose Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization (SCVQ), a novel framework designed for high-efficiency LLM vector quantization. SCVQ introduces a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduces codebook size and indexing costs. Central to our approach is a unified structured representation that consolidates outliers, salient weights, and quantization residuals into a single sparse compensation matrix. This design effectively preserves critical model information while leveraging VQ-specific properties to enable efficient custom kernels. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate SCVQ&#39;s superior performance. Specifically, SCVQ achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization, while delivering a $1.4\times$ end-to-end inference speedup over existing baselines.

ACL 2026

SCVQ: Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization for Large Language Models

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Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily constrained by memory and bandwidth bottlenecks during deployment. Although Vector Quantization (VQ) has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups. Moreover, these methods typically suffer from non-negligible performance degradation under ultra-low bitwidth regimes. To bridge this gap, we propose Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization (SCVQ), a novel framework designed for high-efficiency LLM vector quantization. SCVQ introduces a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduces codebook size and indexing costs. Central to our approach is a unified structured representation that consolidates outliers, salient weights, and quantization residuals into a single sparse compensation matrix. This design effectively preserves critical model information while leveraging VQ-specific properties to enable efficient custom kernels. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate SCVQ's superior performance. Specifically, SCVQ achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization, while delivering a $1.4\times$ end-to-end inference speedup over existing baselines.

technical paper

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.

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Compositional generalization tests are often used to estimate the compositionality of LLMs. However, such tests have the following limitations: (1) they only focus on the output results without considering LLMs' understanding of sample compositionality, resulting in explainability defects; (2) they rely on dataset partition to form the test set with combinations unseen in the training set, suffering from combination leakage issues. In this work, we propose a novel rule-generation perspective for compositionality estimation for LLMs. It requires LLMs to generate a program as rules for dataset mapping and provides estimates of the compositionality of LLMs using complexity-based theory. The perspective addresses the limitations of compositional generalization tests and provides a new way to analyze the compositionality characterization of LLMs. We conduct experiments and analysis of existing advanced LLMs based on this perspective on a string-to-grid task, and find various compositionality characterizations and compositionality deficiencies exhibited by LLMs.

Investigating More Explainable and Partition-Free Compositionality Estimation for LLMs: A Rule-Generation Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory and latency overheads during long-context inference due to the growing KV cache, especially in Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) settings that require support for multiple downstream queries. Query-aware eviction methods do not generalize across queries, while existing query-agnostic approaches rely on a single proxy query, leading to fragile eviction decisions under high eviction ratios. We propose ContrastKV, a robust query-agnostic KV cache eviction algorithm for multi-query generalization. ContrastKV introduces a contrastive signal fusion mechanism that jointly exploits complementary semantic and non-semantic signals. By contrasting semantic consistency with structural robustness, the method constructs a more reliable eviction criterion that alleviates the blind spots of single-query proxies. The framework integrates efficient signal generation, parallel importance scoring, and multi-level fusion across heads and layers. Experiments show that ContrastKV outperforms state-of-the-art methods, retaining up to 92% accuracy with only 20% of the KV cache budget, while reducing decoding latency by approximately 50% and significantly lowering GPU memory usage.

ContrastKV: Robust KV Cache Eviction via Contrastive Signal Fusion for Multi-Query Generalization

Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity─ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs.

Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs

Existing benchmarks and training pipelines for industrial intelligent customer service (ICS) remain misaligned with real-world dialogue requirements, overemphasizing verifiable task success while under-measuring subjective service quality and realistic failure modes, leaving a gap between offline gains and deployable dialogue behavior. We close this gap with a benchmark-to-optimization loop: we first introduce OlaBench, an ICS benchmark spanning retrieval-augmented generation, workflow-based systems, and agentic settings, which evaluates service capability, safety, and latency sensitivity; moreover, motivated by OlaBench results showing state-of-the-art LLMs still fall short, we propose OlaMind, which distills reusable reasoning patterns and service strategies from expert dialogues and applies staged exploration--exploitation reinforcement learning with instance-level rubric-aware guidance to improve model capability. OlaMind surpasses GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro on OlaBench (83.64 vs. 70.58/70.84) and, in online A/B tests, delivers an average +23.67\% issue resolution and -6.6\% human transfer rate versus the baseline, bridging offline gains to deployment. Together, OlaBench and OlaMind advance ICS systems toward more anthropomorphic, professional, and reliable deployment. The project page and evaluation are available at https://olamind-olabench.github.io.

Benchmarking and Learning Real-World Customer Service Dialogue

LLM agents operating in open environments face escalating risks from indirect prompt injection, particularly within the tool stream where manipulated metadata and runtime feedback hijack execution flow. Existing defenses encounter a critical dilemma as advanced models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment while static protection mechanisms sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning. To reconcile this conflict, we propose \textbf{VIGIL}, a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol. By facilitating speculative hypothesis generation and enforcing safety through intent-grounded verification, \textbf{VIGIL} preserves reasoning flexibility while ensuring robust control. We further introduce \textbf{SIREN}, a benchmark comprising 959 tool stream injection cases designed to simulate pervasive threats characterized by dynamic dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{VIGIL} outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22\% while more than doubling the utility under attack compared to static baselines, thereby achieving an optimal balance between security and utility. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/Touring-686/vigil}.

VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool-Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit

Deep Research Agents generate analyst-grade reports, yet evaluating them remains challenging due to the absence of a single ground truth and the multidimensional nature of research quality. Recent benchmarks propose distinct methodologies, yet they suffer from the Mirage of Synthesis, where strong surface-level fluency and citation alignment can obscure underlying factual and reasoning defects. We characterize this gap by introducing a taxonomy across four verticals that exposes a critical capability mismatch: static evaluators inherently lack the tool-use capabilities required to assess temporal validity and factual correctness. To address this, we propose **DREAM** (Deep Research Evaluation with Agentic Metrics), a framework that instantiates the principle of capability parity by making evaluation itself agentic. DREAM structures assessment through an evaluation protocol combining query-agnostic metrics with adaptive metrics generated by a tool-calling agent, enabling temporally aware coverage, grounded verification, and systematic reasoning probes. Controlled evaluations demonstrate DREAM is significantly more sensitive to factual and temporal decay than existing benchmarks, offering a scalable, reference-free evaluation paradigm.

DREAM: Deep Research Evaluation with Agentic Metrics

Do large language models (LLMs) truly acquire embodied cognition and cultural conventions from text? We introduce demonstratives, fundamental spatial expressions like “this/that” in English and “这/那” in Chinese, as a novel probe for grounded knowledge. Using 6,400 responses from 320 native speakers, we establish a human baseline: English speakers reliably distinguish proximal–distal referents but struggle with perspective-taking, while Chinese speakers switch perspectives fluently but tolerate distal ambiguity. In contrast, five state-of-the-art LLMs fail to inherently understand the proximal–distal contrast and show no cultural differences, defaulting to English-centric reasoning. Our study contributes (i) demonstratives as a new lens for evaluating embodied cognition and cultural conventions, (ii) empirical evidence of cross-cultural asymmetries in human interpretation, (iii) a new perspective on the egocentric–sociocentric debate, showing both orientations coexist but vary across languages, and (iv) a call to address individual variation in future model design.

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

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly solve complex reasoning tasks via long chain-of-thought, but their forward-only autoregressive generation process is fragile; early token errors can cascade, which creates a clear need for self-reflection mechanisms. However, existing self-reflection either performs revisions over full drafts or learns self-correction via expensive training, both fundamentally reactive and inefficient. To address this, we propose Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time (SRGen), a lightweight test-time framework that reflects before generating at uncertain points. During token generation, SRGen utilizes dynamic entropy thresholding to identify high-uncertainty tokens. For each identified token, it trains a specific corrective vector, which fully exploits the already generated context for a self-reflective generation to correct the token probability distribution. By retrospectively analyzing the partial output, this self-reflection enables more trustworthy decisions, thereby significantly reducing the probability of errors at highly uncertain points. Evaluated on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks and a diverse set of LLMs, SRGen can significantly strengthen model reasoning. Moreover, our findings position SRGen as a plug-and-play method that integrates reflection into the generation process for reliable LLM reasoning, achieving consistent gains with bounded overhead and can be combined with other training-time (e.g., RLHF) and test-time (e.g., SLOT) techniques.

Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences is pivotal for Machine Translation (MT), yet current approaches are often hindered by misleading reward signals. Our analysis reveals that prevailing Quality Estimation (QE) models exhibit a systematic blind spot towards **partial errors**—specifically partial hallucinations and omissions—often favoring superficially fluent but unfaithful translations. To address this, we propose **M$^2$PO** (**M**ulti-Perspective **M**ulti-Pair **P**reference **O**ptimization), a data-centric framework for preference optimization in machine translation. First, to correct the bias towards fluency, M$^2$PO uses a multi-perspective alignment mechanism that decouples semantic fidelity from fluency, prioritizing faithfulness via a curriculum strategy. Second, with the bias corrected, partial errors fall between perfect and severely incorrect translations, making them inefficient to learn via standard best-versus-worst comparisons. We thus introduce a multi-pair objective that leverages the full candidate list to capture these fine-grained error signals. Experiments on WMT23, WMT24, and FLORES-200 show that M$^2$PO enables a 9B model to outperform leading open-source baselines and achieve parity with proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash, demonstrating significant potential for efficient, high-fidelity LLM-based translation.

M$^2$PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation

Contrastively pretrained audio–language models (e.g., CLAP) excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks.
Existing extensions fail to exploit the varying granularity of real-world audio–text data, where massive clip-level textual descriptions coexist with limited frame-level annotations. 
This paper proposes **Fine**-grained **L**anguage-**A**udio **P**retraining (**FineLAP**), a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data.
FineLAP introduces a dual-stream sigmoid loss with a cluster-based sampling strategy to jointly learn from clip- and frame-level supervision. 
To capture both global semantics and local details, FineLAP uses a decoupled audio projector on top of a self-supervised encoder.
To alleviate the scarcity of temporally annotated data, we present FineLAP-100k, a large-scale synthetic SED dataset constructed through a scalable curation pipeline.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineLAP achieves SOTA performance across multiple audio understanding tasks, including retrieval, classification, sound event detection, and text-to-audio grounding. 
Ablation studies further show that coarse- and fine-grained alignment are mutually beneficial, providing insights for building better audio-language models (ALMs).

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Investigating More Explainable and Partition-Free Compositionality Estimation for LLMs: A Rule-Generation Perspective

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