United States

Effective real-world human–agent interactions, such as household robotic services, are often long-term and repeated. Beyond executing tasks, agents are expected to quickly become familiar with individual users. In everyday use, people do not want to repeatedly specify precise instructions. Instead, they prefer agents that adapt to their habits and preferences over interaction while minimizing communication effort. This poses a key challenge: enabling agents to rapidly align with user needs and provide proactive assistance within limited communication. To study this problem in a realistic embodied setting, we first introduce HA-Desire, a home assistance simulation environment. HA-Desire features an LLM-driven proxy user with value-driven preferences and natural language behavior, enabling systematic evaluation of how agents adapt to users across interactions and satisfy their desires. We further propose FAMER, a framework that integrates goal-relevant memory, desire-centered mental reasoning, and efficient communication to infer user preferences from interaction while reducing unnecessary dialogue. Experiments across embodied household tasks and different LLMs show that FAMER improves both task success and interaction efficiency compared to existing baselines, highlighting the importance of communication-efficient desire alignment for proactive embodied agents that support users without requiring frequent instructions.

ACL 2026

Communication-Efficient Desire Alignment for Proactive Embodied Human–Agent Interaction

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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

Commonsense reasoning often requires both textual and visual knowledge, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) trained solely on text lack visual grounding (e.g., "what color is an emperor penguin's belly?"). Visual Language Models (VLMs) perform better on visually grounded tasks but face two limitations: (i) often reduced performance on text-only commonsense reasoning compared to text-trained LLMs, and (ii) adapting newly released LLMs to vision input typically requires costly multimodal training. An alternative augments LLMs with test-time visual signals, improving visual commonsense without harming textual reasoning, but prior designs often rely on early fusion and a single image, which can be suboptimal. We propose a late multi-image fusion method: multiple images are generated from the text prompt with a lightweight parallel sampling, and their prediction probabilities are combined with those of a text-only LLM through a late-fusion layer that integrates projected visual features just before the final prediction. Across visual commonsense and NLP benchmarks, our method significantly outperforms augmented LLMs on visual reasoning, matches VLMs on vision-based tasks, and, when applied to strong LLMs such as LLaMA 3, also improves NLP performance while adding only modest test-time overhead.

LaMI: Augmenting Large Language Models via Late Multi-Image Fusion

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse domains but remain difficult to deploy in resource-constrained environments due to their size. Low-rank compression is a common remedy, typically minimizing weight reconstruction error under the assumption that weights are low-rank. However, this assumption often does not hold in LLMs. In contrast, LLM activations exhibit a more pronounced low-rank structure, motivating approaches that minimize activation reconstruction error.

This shift alone, however, is not sufficient: different activation dimensions contribute unequally to model performance, and treating them uniformly can lead to accuracy loss. We introduce IMPACT, an importance-aware activation reconstruction framework that links compression to its effect on model performance. IMPACT formulates compression as an optimization problem that integrates activation structure with gradient-based importance, deriving a closed-form solution where reconstruction bases arise from an importance-weighted activation covariance matrix. This yields low-rank compression explicitly optimized for accuracy preservation. Experiments across multiple models and tasks demonstrate that IMPACT achieves up to 55.4% greater model size reduction while maintaining accuracy comparable to or better than state-of-the-art baselines.

IMPACT: Importance-Aware Activation Space Reconstruction

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference through a draft-and-verify paradigm, yet existing methods face three key limitations: reliance on fixed draft templates that ignore device-specific verification costs, lack of mechanisms to assess draft token quality, and suboptimal tree expansion strategies. We introduce UniSpec, a training-free, lossless speculative decoding framework that enables robust, plug-and-play LLM acceleration across diverse hardware configurations and languages. UniSpec incorporates three novel components: (1) a device-aware calibration mechanism that determines the optimal draft size by measuring the acceptance-time trade-off on each target device; (2) a confidence score estimation module that assigns quality scores to n-grams based on the verifier's token probabilities, enabling selective retention of high-quality draft candidates; and (3) an improved tree expansion strategy that broadens first-level exploration and applies threshold-based filtering to prune low-confidence nodes. To comprehensively evaluate multilingual performance, we create a comprehensive benchmark, covering seven languages across seven generation tasks. Experiments with various LLM architectures, hardware environments, and languages demonstrate that UniSpec consistently outperforms existing training-free methods, achieving speedups of up to 2.6x while maintaining output quality identical to standard autoregressive decoding. Our code and benchmark are publicly available.

UniSpec: Training-Free Speculative Decoding for Robust LLM Acceleration Across Languages and Hardware

Neologism-aware machine translation aims to translate source sentences containing neologisms into target languages.
This field remains underexplored compared with general machine translation (MT).
In this paper, we propose an agentic framework, NeoAMT, for neologism-aware machine translation equipped with a Wiktionary-based search toolkit.
Specifically, we first construct a dedicated dataset for neologism-aware machine translation and build a search toolkit grounded in Wiktionary.
The dataset covers 16 languages and 75 translation directions in total, derived from approximately 10 million records of an English Wiktionary dump.
The retrieval corpus of the search toolkit is also constructed from around 3 million cleaned records of the same dump.
We then leverage the dataset and toolkit to train a translation agent via reinforcement learning (RL) and to evaluate the accuracy of neologism-aware machine translation.
Furthermore, we propose an RL training framework featuring a novel reward design and an adaptive rollout generation strategy that exploits translation difficulty to further improve the translation quality of translation agents using our search toolkit.

NeoAMT: Neologism-Aware Agentic Machine Translation with Reinforcement Learning

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference.
Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further improvements difficult even with carefully engineered designs.
We present \textbf{S2O}, which performs early \textbf{s}topping for \textbf{s}parse attention via \textbf{o}nline permutation.
Inspired by virtual-to-physical address mapping in memory systems, S2O revisits and factorizes FlashAttention execution, enabling inference to load non-contiguous tokens rather than a contiguous span in the original order.
Motivated by fine-grained structures in attention heatmaps, we transform explicit permutation into an online, index-guided, discrete loading policy; with extremely lightweight preprocessing and index-remapping overhead, it concentrates importance on a small set of high-priority blocks.
Building on this importance-guided online permutation for loading, S2O further introduces an early-stopping rule: computation proceeds from high to low importance; once the current block score falls below a threshold, S2O terminates early and skips the remaining low-contribution blocks, thereby increasing effective sparsity and reducing computation under a controlled error budget.
As a result, S2O substantially raises the practical sparsity ceiling.
On \textbf{Llama-3.1-8B} under a \textbf{128K} context, S2O reduces single-operator MSE by \textbf{3.82$\times$} at matched sparsity, and reduces prefill compute density by \textbf{3.31$\times$} at matched MSE; meanwhile, it preserves end-to-end accuracy and achieves \textbf{7.51$\times$} attention and \textbf{3.81$\times$} end-to-end speedups.

S2O: Early Stopping for Sparse Attention via Online Permutation

The explainable medical coding task aims to automatically assign International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes to clinical notes while providing explicit justifications for each assignment. Recent approaches employ large language models (LLMs) to generate such explanations. However, their performance remains limited due to a lack of understanding of the clinical meanings of ICD codes. Additionally, the vast ICD code space further complicates the task of accurate prediction. To address these challenges, we propose the ICDAGENT framework, which consists of two collaborative LLM agents: a coding agent and a critical agent. The coding agent extracts ICD codes and generates preliminary rationales, while the critical agent performs fine-grained chain-of-thought reasoning to verify and refine them. Furthermore, the critical agent is trained with a rationale-aware reward, combined with reinforcement learning, enabling it to distinguish between correct and incorrect reasoning and ensure explanation accuracy. Experiments across multiple ICD coding standards and datasets demonstrate that ICDAGENT achieves effective ICD coding with accurate and trustworthy explanations.

ICDAGENT: Empowering Agentic Large Language Models for Explainable Medical Coding

What enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively model user preferences in sequential recommendation? Our investigation reveals that existing preference-alignment approaches largely rely on binary pairwise comparisons, overlooking two critical factors: preference intensity (the structured strength of affinity or aversion) and temporal context (the extent to which recent interactions better reflect a user's current intent). Through controlled experiments, we show that leveraging comprehensive feedback with structured preference signals substantially improves recommendation performance, indicating that binary modeling discards essential information. Motivated by these findings, we propose RecPO, a unified preference optimization framework that maps both explicit and implicit feedback into a common preference signal and constructs adaptive reward margins that jointly account for preference intensity and interaction recency. Experiments across five datasets show that RecPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while exhibiting behavioral patterns aligned with human decision-making, including favoring immediate satisfaction, maintaining preference coherence, and avoiding dispreferred items. Our results highlight that preference intensity and temporal context are fundamental ingredients for effective LLM-based recommendation. Code: https://github.com/zyouyang/RecPO

What Makes LLMs Effective Sequential Recommenders? A Study on Preference Intensity and Temporal Context

Verification is critical for improving agents: it provides the reward signal for Reinforcement Learning and enables inference-time gains through Test-Time Scaling (TTS). Despite its importance, verification in software engineering (SWE) agent settings often relies on code execution, which can be difficult to scale due to environment setup overhead. Scalable alternatives such as patch classifiers and heuristic methods exist, but they are less grounded in codebase context and harder to interpret. To this end, we explore Agentic Rubrics: an expert agent interacts with the repository to create a context-grounded rubric checklist, and candidate patches are then scored against it without requiring test execution. On SWE-Bench Verified under parallel TTS evaluation, Agentic Rubrics achieve a score of 54.2% on Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B and 40.6% on Qwen3-32B, with at least a +3.5 percentage-point gain over the strongest baseline in our comparison set. We further analyze rubric behavior, showing that rubric scores are consistent with ground-truth tests while also flagging issues that tests do not capture. Our ablations show that agentic context gathering is essential for producing codebase-specific, unambiguous criteria. Together, these results suggest that Agentic Rubrics provide an efficient, scalable, and granular verification signal for SWE agents.

Agentic Rubrics as Contextual Verifiers for SWE Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance and rapid progress in a wide range of medical reasoning tasks.
However, their sequential autoregressive decoding forces inherently parallel clinical reasoning, such as differential diagnosis, into a single linear reasoning path, limiting both efficiency and reliability for complex medical problems.
To address this, we propose MedVerse, a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph (DAG) process based on Petri Net theory.
The framework adopts a full-stack design across data, model architecture, and system execution.
For data creation, we introduce the MedVerse Curator, an automated pipeline that synthesizes knowledge-grounded medical reasoning path and transforms them into Petri Net–structured representations.
At the architectural level, we propose a topology-aware attention mechanism with adaptive position indices that supports parallel reasoning while preserving logical consistency.
Systematically, we develop a customized inference engine that supports parallel execution without additional overhead.
Empirical evaluations show that MedVerse improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9\%. Compared to specialized medical LLMs, MedVerse achieves comparable performance with improved clinical reliability, while delivering a 1.3$\times$ reduction in inference latency and a 1.7$\times$ increase in generation throughput, enabled by its parallel decoding capability.

MedVerse: Efficient and Reliable Medical Reasoning via DAG-Structured Parallel Execution

Interleaved reasoning paradigms enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with visual feedback but are hindered by the prohibitive computational cost of re-encoding pixel-dense images. A promising alternative, latent visual reasoning, circumvents this bottleneck yet faces limitations: methods either fail to capture intermediate state evolution due to single-step, non-interleaved structures, or sacrifice precise perceptual modeling by over-compressing features. We introduce Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning (ILVR), a framework that unifies dynamic state evolution with precise perceptual modeling. ILVR interleaves textual generation with latent visual representations that act as specific, evolving cues for subsequent reasoning. Specifically, we employ a self-supervision strategy where a momentum teacher model selectively distills relevant features from ground-truth intermediate images into sparse supervision targets. This adaptive selection mechanism guides the model to autonomously generate context-aware visual signals. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ILVR outperforms existing approaches, effectively bridging the gap between fine-grained perception and sequential multimodal reasoning.

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