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Recent works proposed test-time alignment methods that rely on a small aligned model as a proxy that guides the generation of a larger base (unaligned) model. The implicit reward approach skews the large model distribution, whereas the nudging approach defers the generation of the next token to the small aligned model when the large base one is unconfident about its outcome. In this work, we first show that both approaches can be reduced to sampling from similar graphical models, where they differ only in the definition of a rejection criterion (or distribution). Moreover, we argue that the confidence criterion is ill-motivated due to linguistic phenomena like ambiguous phrasing. We propose a novel rejection criterion based on a conservative confidence bet. Experimentally, our novel approach outperforms previous work on several datasets.

ACL 2026

On the Rejection Criterion for Proxy-based Test-time Alignment

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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.

In real-world business environments, data is stored in a variety of sources, including structured relational databases, semi-structured databases, and unstructured files. The ability to extract reasonable insights across these diverse sources is integral to data-driven decision-making. Existing benchmarks, however, are limited in assessing agents' capabilities across these diverse data types. To address this gap, we introduce UniDataBench, a multi-source benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of data analytics agents in handling diverse data sources. Specifically, UniDataBench is constructed based on real-life industry analysis reports, employing a pipeline to synthesize data that aligns with authentic analytical trends. It encompasses diverse datasets spanning relational databases, CSV files, and NoSQL stores to reflect real-world business settings, and provides a unified framework for evaluating how effectively agents can explore multiple data formats, extract insights, and generate meaningful summaries and recommendations. 
Based on UniDataBench, we propose a novel LLM-based agent named ReActInsight, an autonomous agent that performs end-to-end analysis over diverse data sources by automatically discovering cross-source linkages, decomposing goals, and generating robust, self-correcting code to extract actionable insights. Our benchmark and agent together provide a framework for facilitating the development of data analytics agents in real-world applications.

UniDataBench: Evaluating Data Analytics Agents Across Structured and Unstructured Data

We introduce MMSciCode, a comprehensive expert-level, multilingual multi-discipline benchmark for evaluating foundation models in scientific code generation. It includes 624 expert-annotated research coding problems spanning six core scientific disciplines. Compared to prior benchmarks, MMSciCode features three key advancements. First, it challenges models to integrate domain-specific knowledge with algorithmic reasoning to implement core functions from research papers, moving beyond the isolated, general-purpose coding tasks typically assessed in current benchmarks. Second, each problem is meticulously annotated by domain experts through a rigorous paper-grounded process, with strict quality controls implemented to ensure dataset integrity and authenticity. Finally, each problem is equipped with comprehensive unit test suites and containerized environments, enabling reproducible and diagnostic evaluation of both functional correctness and domain validity. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 28 state-of-the-art foundation models and 2 agentic coding tools on MMSciCode. Our results reveal that even the best non-agentic model achieves only around 15\% accuracy, while the top agentic coding tool reaches 32.2\%, both still far below human expert performance of 68.8\%. Through comprehensive error analyses and case studies, we identify substantial performance gaps between models and human experts, providing actionable insights for advancing expert-level scientific code generation.

MMSciCode: Real-world Evaluation of Multilingual Multi-Discipline Scientific Research Coding

Intelligent dialogue systems are increasingly deployed in emotionally and ethically sensitive settings, where failures in either emotional attunement or ethical judgment can cause significant harm. Existing dialogue models typically address empathy and ethical safety in isolation, and often fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve across multi-turn interactions. We formulate ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem, and propose \textsc{EthicMind}, a risk-aware framework that implements this formulation in multi-turn dialogue at inference time. At each turn, \textsc{EthicMind} jointly analyzes ethical risk signals and user emotion, plans a high-level response strategy, and generates context-sensitive replies that balance ethical guidance with emotional engagement, without requiring additional model training. To evaluate alignment behavior under ethically complex interactions, we introduce a risk-stratified, multi-turn evaluation protocol with a context-aware user simulation procedure. Experimental results show that \textsc{EthicMind} achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than competitive baselines, particularly in high-risk and morally ambiguous scenarios.

EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue

To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to fluid narrative evolution. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in a event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Graph-guided, Multi-factor Retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA benchmarks indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency.

GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents

Neologisms, emerging terms in meaning or form, can serve as new vehicles for toxic expression, like "田园女" ("country girl") as a stigmatizing label targeting feminism. Such toxic neologisms appear benign but have evolved into toxic usage in public consensus, posing challenges to moderation systems and remaining underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how to detect implicit toxicity expressed via neologisms. We first propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms, followed by the construction of a lexicon spanning widely observed risk categories. To capture toxicity grounded in public consensus, we introduce **SeTox**, a search-augmented framework that enables static large language models (LLMs) to incorporate real-time web context for neologism toxicity detection. Experiments show that **SeTox**, even with 3B-scale models, outperforms recent large-scale models, demonstrating its scalability to incorporate real-world knowledge for toxic neologism detection. **Disclaimer**: this paper has offensive contents that may be disturbing to some readers.

New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine which relations hold between a given entity pair within a document. As a multi-label classification task, the most commonly adopted paradigm introduces a learnable threshold to distinguish positive and negative classes for an entity pair. Under this paradigm, existing losses decouple the optimization into independent positive and negative losses, which interact solely with a shared threshold. This leads to two inherent limitations: (*i*) threshold instability caused by conflicting gradient updates from the decoupled losses; and (*ii*) optimization bias exacerbated by the severe imbalance between limited positive samples and abundant negative samples inherent in DocRE, which makes the model more likely to predict that no relation exists.

To address these issues, we propose the **A**daptive-**T**hreshold **G**lobal **L**oss (ATGL). Unlike prior work, ATGL integrates positive, negative, and threshold optimization into a unified logit space and explicitly enforces ranking constraints on their contributions to the objective. Furthermore, ATGL incorporates an imbalance-aware optimization mechanism, thereby effectively addressing the severe class imbalance in DocRE. Our ATGL serves as a general optimization objective that can be readily applied to different DocRE models. Experiments on four datasets show that ATGL outperforms other DocRE losses and achieves state-of-the-art results, while consistently improving the performance of existing DocRE models. Code is available at https://github.com/xhm-code/ATGL.

ATGL: An Adaptive-Threshold Global Loss for Document-level Relation Extraction

Emergency departments (ED) rely on the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) to assess patient acuity and prioritize care, a process that is largely driven by clinical triage text. Despite recent progress in automated ESI prediction, two fundamental challenges remain: the scarcity of high-quality triage text data due to privacy and regulatory constraints and the lack of a clinically grounded triage framework capable of explicitly capturing the multidimensional structure of triage reasoning. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the clinically grounded SOAP paradigm, in which SOAP refers to Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan and captures four complementary aspects of clinical reasoning. Building on this paradigm, we propose SOAPTriage, a SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling framework for automated ESI prediction. To mitigate data scarcity, SOAPTriage introduces a Clinical Note Augmentation (CNA) module that generates natural-language triage notes from structured ED records, resulting in 15,393 augmented clinical notes derived from a real-world dataset. To incorporate clinical structure, SOAPTriage employs a SOAP-Guided Encoding (SGE) module that models patient conditions from four complementary SOAP perspectives, together with an adaptive SOAP-Aware Aggregation and Inference (SAAI) module that performs multi-view reasoning to infer ESI levels. Extensive experiments show that SOAPTriage consistently outperforms strong prompting-based, multi-agent, and encoder-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling for automated emergency triage.

SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction

Scientific ideation aims to propose novel solutions within a given scientific context. Existing LLM-based agentic approaches emulate human research workflows, yet inadequately model scientific reasoning, resulting in surface-level conceptual recombinations that lack technical depth and scientific grounding. To address this issue, we propose $\textbf{MoRI}$ ($\textbf{Mo}$tivation-grounded $\textbf{R}$easoning for Scientific $\textbf{I}$deation), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly learn the reasoning process from research motivations to methodologies. The base LLM is initialized via supervised fine-tuning to generate a research motivation from a given context, and is subsequently trained under a composite reinforcement learning reward that approximates scientific rigor: (1) entropy-aware information gain encourages the model to uncover and elaborate high-complexity technical details grounded in ground-truth methodologies, and (2) contrastive semantic gain constrains the reasoning trajectory to remain conceptually aligned with scientifically valid solutions. Empirical results show that MoRI consistently outperforms strong commercial LLMs and complex agentic baselines across multiple dimensions, including novelty, technical rigor, and feasibility. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/IdeaGeneration}{GitHub}.

MoRI: Learning Motivation-Grounded Reasoning for Scientific Ideation in Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) agents have exhibited strong problem-solving competence across domains like research and coding. Yet, it remains underexplored whether LLM agents can tackle compounding real-world problems that require a diverse set of tools to complete. 
Given a broad, heterogeneous tool repository, LLM agents must not only select appropriate tools based on task planning analysis but also strategically schedule the execution order to ensure efficiency. This paper introduces TPS-Bench to benchmark the ability of LLM agents in solving such problems that demand Tool Planning and Scheduling. TPS-Bench collects 200 compounding tasks of two difficulty levels, based on a tool repository containing hundreds of model context protocol (MCP) tools. In particular, each task is composed of multiple subtasks, such as web search, map navigation, calendar checking, etc., and each subtask can be completed by a basic tool. Our evaluation emphasizes both task completion rate and efficiency. The empirical studies on popular closed-source and open-source LLMs indicate that most models can perform reasonable tool planning, but differ in scheduling. For example, GLM-4.5 achieves an outperforming task completion rate of 64.72% with extensive sequential tool calls, hence suffering from significantly long execution time. By contrast, GPT-4o prioritizes parallel tool calls but achieves only a 45.08% completion rate. Considering reinforcement learning (RL) can be a viable way to improve the scheduling efficiency without compromising performance, we perform an initial study on Qwen3-1.7B and witness a 14% reduction in execution time alongside a 6% gain in task completion rate based on only 597 RL training samples.

TPS-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents’ Tool Planning & Scheduling Abilities in Compounding Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) used for multiple-choice and pairwise evaluation tasks often exhibit selection bias due to non-semantic factors like option positions and label symbols. Existing inference-time debiasing is costly and may harm reasoning, while pointwise training ignores that the same question should yield consistent answers across permutations. To address this issue, we propose Permutation-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (PA-GRPO), which mitigates selection bias by enforcing permutation-consistent semantic reasoning. PA-GRPO constructs a permutation group for each instance by generating multiple candidate permutations, and optimizes the model using two complementary mechanisms: (1) cross-permutation advantage, which computes advantages relative to the mean reward over all permutations of the same instance, and (2) consistency-aware reward, which encourages the model to produce consistent decisions across different permutations. Experimental results demonstrate that PA-GRPO outperforms strong baselines across seven benchmarks, substantially reducing selection bias while maintaining high overall performance. The code is available on github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/PA-GRPO).

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UniDataBench: Evaluating Data Analytics Agents Across Structured and Unstructured Data

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Nudging: Inference-time Alignment of LLMs via Guided Decoding