United States

Continual Pre-training (CPT) serves as a fundamental approach for adapting foundation models to domain-specific applications. Scaling laws for pre-training define a power-law relationship between dataset size and the test loss of an LLM. However, the marginal gains from simply increasing data for CPT diminish rapidly, yielding suboptimal data utilization and inefficient training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel perplexity-aware data scaling law to establish a predictive relationship between the perplexity landscape of domain-specific data and the test loss. Our approach leverages the pre-trained model’s own perplexity on domain data as a proxy for estimating the knowledge gap, effectively quantifying the informational perplexity landscape of candidate training samples. By fitting this scaling law across diverse perplexity regimes, we enable adaptive selection of high-utility data subsets, prioritizing content that maximizes knowledge absorption while minimizing redundancy and noise. Extensive experiments on both medical and general-domain benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets, achieving superior performance with significantly reduced data consumption.

ACL 2026

Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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.

Efficient reproduction of research papers is pivotal to accelerating scientific progress. However, the increasing complexity of proposed methods often renders reproduction a labor-intensive endeavor, necessitating profound domain expertise.
To address this, we introduce the paper lineage, which systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature. This algorithm serves as the backbone of our proposed \ours, a multi-agent framework designed to autonomously reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. To ensure code executability, \ours incorporates a sampling-based unit testing strategy for rapid validation. To assess reproduction capabilities, we introduce \ourbench, a benchmark featuring verified implementations, alongside comprehensive metrics for evaluating both reproduction and execution fidelity. Extensive evaluations on PaperBench and \ourbench demonstrate that \ours consistently surpasses existing baselines across all metrics. Notably, it yields substantial improvements in reproduction fidelity and final execution performance. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AI9Stars/AutoReproduce}.

AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage

Language model families exhibit striking disparity in their capacity to benefit from reinforcement learning: under identical training, models like Qwen achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. Complementing data-centric approaches, we reveal that this disparity reflects a hidden structural property: **distributional clarity** in probability space. Through a three-stage analysis—from phenomenon to mechanism to interpretation—we uncover that RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in their probability assignments to correct vs. incorrect responses. We quantify this clarity using the **Silhouette Coefficient** ($S$) and demonstrate that (1) high $S$ correlates strongly with RL performance; (2) low $S$ is associated with severe logic errors and reasoning instability. To confirm this property, we introduce a Silhouette-Aware Reweighting strategy that prioritizes low-$S$ samples during training. Experiments across six mathematical benchmarks show consistent improvements across all model families, with gains up to 5.9 points on AIME24. Our work establishes distributional clarity as a fundamental, trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness.

Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models

Training LLMs at ultra-low precision remains a formidable challenge. Direct low-bit QAT often suffers from convergence instability and substantial training costs, exacerbated by quantization noise from heavy-tailed outlier channels and error accumulation across layers. To address these issues, we present $\text{Bit-by-Bit}$, a progressive QAT framework with outlier channel splitting. Our approach integrates three key components: (1) block-wise progressive training that reduces precision stage by stage, ensuring stable initialization for low-bit optimization; (2) nested structure of integer quantization grids to enable a "train once, deploy any precision" paradigm, allowing a single model to support multiple bit-widths without retraining; (3) rounding-aware outlier channel splitting, which mitigates quantization error while acting as an identity transform that preserves the quantized outputs. Furthermore, we follow microscaling groups with E4M3 scales, capturing dynamic activation ranges in alignment with OCP/NVIDIA standards. To address the lack of efficient 2-bit kernels, we developed custom operators for both W2A2 and W2A16 configurations, achieving up to 11$\times$ speedup over BF16. Under W2A2 settings, $\text{Bit-by-Bit}$ significantly outperforms baselines like BitDistiller and EfficientQAT on both Llama2/3, achieving a loss of only 2.25 WikiText2 PPL compared to full-precision models.

Bit-by-Bit: Progressive QAT Strategy with Outlier Channel Splitting for Stable Low-Bit LLMs

The rising sophistication of digital surveillance poses hurdles for concealing sensitive data within innocuous communication channels. Conventional image steganography relies on detectable pixel-level perturbations. In this paper, we introduce a novel steganography framework that fundamentally reorients the steganographic containers from the visual domain to the linguistic domain. To seamlessly bridge the gap from raw pixels to discriminative logits, we leverage the reversible latent space of discrete diffusion models to compress high-resolution secret images into lightweight binary payloads. The semantic stability of textual data ensures the integrity of the hidden payload across diverse platforms. Extensive evaluations confirm that this cross-modal approach establishes a superior equilibrium between embedding capacity and statistical undetectability in comparison to existing paradigms.

Steganography Beyond Pixels: Reimagining Image Steganography as Cross-Modal Linguistic Communication

Conversational query rewriting (CQR) addresses context dependence in conversational search by rewriting each user query into a standalone form. Recent approaches leverage reinforcement learning (RL) to directly optimize retrieval effectiveness; however, they typically rely on a single rewrite, which struggles to accommodate the divergent preferences of sparse and dense retrievers and often suffers from conflicting optimization signals. We propose DVCQR, a Dual-View CQR framework that explicitly generates two complementary rewrites for each query: a sparse-view rewrite that emphasizes distinctive lexical anchors, and a dense-view rewrite that captures complete semantic constraints. Both rewrites are produced in a single pass via a structured reasoning process. To further mitigate objective conflicts, we introduce a stage-wise RL strategy that sequentially aligns the sparse and dense views with their corresponding retrievers using rank-based feedback. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks (TopiOCQA, QReCC, CAsT-19, and CAsT-20) demonstrate that DVCQR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most metrics under both sparse and dense retrieval settings, validating the effectiveness of dual-view rewriting and stage-wise retriever alignment.

DVCQR: Dual-View Conversational Query Rewriting with Stage-wise Reinforcement Learning

While neural ranking models (NRMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in information retrieval, they remain highly vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial perturbations. Existing defenses are predominantly data-centric, exemplified by adversarial training, which requires constructing large collections of adversarial examples. By treating NRMs as black boxes and indiscriminately optimizing all model parameters, these methods incur substantial computational cost and often degrade performance on clean data due to overfitting. In this paper, we advocate that adversarial vulnerability is not uniformly distributed across model parameters, but instead originates from specific internal units. We propose a paradigm shift toward a model-centric defense that addresses vulnerability at its architectural source, without requiring costly retraining or adversarial data generation. Specifically, we introduce Search in the Model, a novel training-free framework that performs fine-grained identification and rectification of vulnerable neurons directly within the model. By formulating neuron identification as a ranking problem, we develop a maximum marginal vulnerability criterion to precisely locate the top-$K$
neurons most responsible for model vulnerability, and apply targeted neuronal inverse perturbation to correct them. Extensive experiments on MS MARCO and TREC 19 show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both defense efficiency and robustness to seen and unseen attacks, while preserving strong performance on clean data.

Stop Hardening Everything: A Training-Free Neuron-Level Defense for Neural Ranking Models

Existing detoxification methods for large language models mainly focus on post-training stage or inference time, while few tackle the source of toxicity, namely, the dataset itself. Such training-based or controllable decoding approaches cannot completely suppress the model's inherent toxicity, whereas detoxifying the pretraining dataset can fundamentally reduce the toxicity that the model learns during training. Hence, we attempt to detoxify directly on raw corpora with SoCD (Soft Contrastive Decoding), which guides an LLM to localize and rewrite toxic spans in raw data while preserving semantics, in our proposed HSPD (Hierarchical Semantic-Preserving Detoxification) pipeline, yielding a detoxified corpus that can drop-in replace the original for fine-tuning or other training. On GPT2-XL, HSPD attains state-of-the-art detoxification, reducing Toxicity Probability (TP) from 0.42 to 0.18 and Expected Maximum Toxicity (EMT) from 0.43 to 0.20. We further validate consistent best-in-class results on LLaMA2-7B, OPT-6.7B, and Falcon-7B. These findings show that semantics-preserving, corpus-level rewriting with HSPD effectively suppresses downstream toxicity while retaining data utility and allowing seamless source-level mitigation, thereby reducing the cost of later model behavior adjustment.

Detoxification for LLM: From Dataset Itself

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, driven by their powerful inference-time scaling capability.
However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, which results in substantial computational redundancy and significantly reduces efficiency.
Early-exit methods aim to mitigate this issue by terminating reasoning once sufficient evidence has been generated, yet existing approaches mostly rely on handcrafted or empirical indicators that are unreliable and impractical.
In this work, we introduce Dynamic Thought Sufficiency in Reasoning (DTSR), a novel framework for efficient reasoning that enables the model to dynamically assess the sufficiency of its chain-of-thought (CoT) and determine the optimal point for early exit.
Inspired by human metacognition, DTSR operates in two stages: (1) Reflection Signal Monitoring, which identifies reflection signals as potential cues for early exit, and (2) Thought Sufficiency Check, which evaluates whether the current CoT is sufficient to derive the final answer.
Experimental results on the Qwen3 models show that DTSR reduces reasoning length by 28.9\%–34.9\% with minimal performance loss, effectively mitigating overthinking.
We further discuss overconfidence in LRMs and self-evaluation paradigms, providing valuable insights for early-exit reasoning.

When Is Thinking Enough? Early Exit via Sufficiency Assessment for Efficient Reasoning

Table serialization remains a critical bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex table question answering, hindered by challenges such as structural neglect, representation gaps, and reasoning opacity. Existing serialization methods fail to capture explicit hierarchies and lack schema flexibility, while current tree-based approaches suffer from limited semantic adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose **ASTRA** (**A**daptive **S**emantic **T**ree **R**easoning **A**rchitecture) including two main modules, **AdaSTR** and **DuTR**. First, we introduce **AdaSTR**, which leverages the global semantic awareness of LLMs to reconstruct tables into Logical Semantic Trees. This serialization explicitly models hierarchical dependencies and employs an adaptive mechanism to optimize construction strategies based on table scale. Second, building on this structure, we present **DuTR**, a dual-mode reasoning framework that integrates tree-search-based textual navigation for linguistic alignment and symbolic code execution for precise verification. Experiments on complex table benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

ASTRA: Adaptive Semantic Tree Reasoning Architecture for Complex Table Question Answering

Instruction-following is a foundational capability of large language models (LLMs), with its improvement hinging on scalable and accurate feedback from judge models. However, the reliability of current judge models in instruction-following remains underexplored due to several deficiencies of existing meta-evaluation benchmarks, such as their insufficient data coverage and oversimplified pairwise evaluation paradigms that misalign with model optimization scenarios. To this end, we propose IF-RewardBench, a comprehensive meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction-following that covers diverse instruction and constraint types. For each instruction, we construct a preference graph containing all pairwise preferences among multiple responses based on instruction-following quality. This design enables a listwise evaluation paradigm that assesses the capabilities of judge models to rank multiple responses, which is essential in guiding model alignment. Extensive experiments on IF-RewardBench reveal significant deficiencies in current judge models and demonstrate that our benchmark achieves a stronger positive correlation with downstream task performance compared to existing benchmarks. Our codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/thu-coai/IF-RewardBench}.

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