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Retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) systems depend on retrieval modules to supply grounding evidence for large language models. While hybrid approaches combining sparse and dense retrievers improve performance, most rely on fixed weights that ignore query-specific and corpus-specific variation. Similarly, query expansion has long been used to enrich recall, but its integration with original queries is usually static and can introduce noise. We present QuDAR, a dual-perspective adaptive retrieval framework that adapts along two perspectives: retriever type (sparse vs. dense) and query format (original vs.expanded). Leveraging margin-derived confidence (e.g., top-1--top-2 score gaps) and blind LLM-based relevance scoring, QuDAR dynamically assigns query-specific weights, fusing lexical specificity with semantic breadth while mitigating noise. QuDAR is lightweight, retriever-agnostic, and broadly applicable. Experiments show consistent gains over static baselines, improving overall retrieval quality and yielding more stable performance across queries.

ACL 2026

 QuDAR: Query-Wise Dual-Perspective Adaptive Retrieval

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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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.

The growing sequence length of large language models poses significant challenges for key-value (KV) caches. Existing state-of-the-art cache eviction methods primarily analyze the inference behavior of attention heads in successful retrieval-reasoning cases, often overlooking diverse behaviors in failure cases, such as bias and distraction. This oversight limits the potential to leverage heterogeneous head behaviors for improved eviction performance. Inspired by the confusion matrix, we introduce an Attention Behavior Matrix to comprehensively analyze attention head behaviors in both success and failure scenarios. By maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio — strengthening valid reasoning pathways in success cases while inhibiting noise from bias and distraction in failure cases — we propose REtrieval-reAsoning and Logic-constructed (REAL) KV cache eviction, the first method to leverage multi-behavior analysis. Comprehensive evaluations show that REAL achieves remarkable performance across various models and benchmarks; notably, on LongBench v2, it achieves comparable accuracy to the strongest baseline, HeadKV-R2, while requiring 32x less space. By offering a novel perspective on behavior analysis, we pave the way for a shift from success-only to comprehensive, failure-aware methods in long-context modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/yonseicasl/REAL.

REAL: REtrieval-reAsoning and Logic-constructed Attention Behaviors for Long-Context KV Cache Compression

The rapid proliferation of large audio models (LAMs) demands efficient approaches for model comparison, yet comprehensive benchmarks are costly. To fill this gap, we investigate whether minimal subsets can reliably evaluate LAMs while reducing costs and data redundancy. Analyzing 10 subset selection methods with 18 audio models across 40 tasks covering major LAM evaluation dimensions, we show that subsets of just 50 examples (0.3% of data) can achieve over 0.93 Pearson correlation with full benchmark scores. To understand how well these scores align with what practitioners ultimately care about—user satisfaction—we collect 776 human preference ratings from realistic voice assistant conversations, finding that both subsets and full benchmark achieve only 0.85 correlation with human. To better predict preferences, we trained regression models on these selected subsets, achieving 0.98 correlation—outperforming regression models trained on both random subsets and the full benchmark. This demonstrates that in regression modeling, well-curated subsets outpredict the full benchmark, showing quality over quantity. We open-source these regression-weighted subsets as the HUMANS benchmark, an efficient proxy for LAM evaluation that captures both benchmark performance and user preferences.

Putting HUMANS first: Efficient LAM Evaluation with Human Preference Alignment

The linguistic proximity between Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish results in a lexical overlap that often conceals semantic interference. This is particularly evident in false friends, posing a challenge for NLP systems.
In this work, we assess whether state-of-the-art language models can identify and process false friends among these languages. We introduce six cross-lingual datasets --created manually or using semi-automatic methods, with all instances being carefully verified-- covering cognates and false friends. We evaluate a broad range of encoder and decoder models of varying sizes via zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our results highlight the challenging nature of the task, but also show the clear progress made by LLMs in recent years, particularly those of a larger size, with smaller language models struggling on the task. Notably, unlike other tasks where language distance poses additional challenges, we find that linguistic proximity itself introduces errors: closely related language pairs tend to perform worse, reflecting the challenge of semantic discrimination due to lexical overlap.

False Friends or Cognates? A Cross-lingual Semantic Ambiguity Evaluation for Galician, Portuguese and Spanish

Answering natural language queries over relational data often requires retrieving and reasoning over multiple tables, yet most retrievers optimize only for query–table relevance and ignore table–table compatibility. We introduce REaR (Retrieve, Expand and Refine), a three-stage, LLM-free framework that separates semantic relevance from structural joinability for efficient, high-fidelity multi-table retrieval. REaR (i) retrieves query-aligned tables, (ii) expands these with structurally joinable tables via fast, precomputed column-embedding comparisons, and (iii) refines them by pruning noisy or weakly related candidates. Empirically, REaR is retriever-agnostic and consistently improves dense/ sparse retrievers on complex table QA datasets (BIRD, MMQA, and Spider) by improving both multi-table retrieval quality and downstream SQL execution. Despite being LLM-free, it delivers performance competitive with state-of-the-art LLM-augmented retrieval systems (e.g., ARM) while achieving much lower latency and cost. Ablations confirm complementary gains from expansion and refinement, underscoring REaR as a practical, scalable building block for table-based downstream tasks (e.g., Text-to-SQL).

 REaR : Retrieve, Expand and Refine for Effective Multitable Retrieval

Smart Contracts are the foundation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), executing financial logic without trusted intermediaries. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have substantially lowered the barrier to smart contract development by enabling code generation from natural language. However, because smart contracts are immutable and directly manage financial assets, this accessibility introduces a critical trust gap: generated contracts are easy to produce but hard to trust. To bridge this gap, we present LeVer, the first trustworthy smart contract synthesis framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based auto-formalization and Verification. LeVer employs a closed-loop multi-agent architecture to iteratively generate, verify, attack, and repair contracts, providing both formal guarantees and empirical robustness. To facilitate the adoption of automated formal verification in smart contract generation and audition, we open-source our framework and datasets at: https://github.com/gl-bowei/LeVer

Towards Trustworthy Smart Contract Synthesis: A Multi-Agent Framework with Lean-Based Verification

Visual scale recognition is a fundamental aspect for humans to perceive physical quantities in the real world, and it is crucial for enabling human-like intelligence in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing benchmarks typically focus on a single type of quantity (e.g., time) or a specific format (e.g., dials), lacking a comprehensive evaluation of scale recognition capabilities. To address these problems, we propose ScaleBench, a visual scale recognition benchmark built using images from COCO, Open Images, and Flickr, designed to comprehensively evaluate the scale recognition capabilities of MLLMs. To ensure high data quality, we develop detailed annotation guidelines and procedures, resulting in a total of 6,574 annotated samples. Based on this benchmark, we evaluate multiple closed-source and open-source MLLMs. Experimental results reveal that the best-performing model achieves only 42.60% accuracy, far lower than the 97.40% of humans. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth experimental analyses and provide future research directions. Our benchmark and implementation codes are available at https://github.com/Sonder-hang/ScaleBench.

Tiny Scales, Great Challenges: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Scale Recognition

Existing state-of-the-art symbolic music generation models represent symbolic music as a sequence of attribute tokens with fixed unidirectional dependencies. However, from the perspective of music theory, the attributes of a musical note are inherently a set rather than a sequence. Building on this insight, we propose Amadeus, a novel symbolic music generation framework that adopts a two-level architecture: an autoregressive model for note sequences and a bidirectional discrete diffusion model for note attributes. This design enables flexible attribute control and adjustable decoding speed during inference. To further enhance sequential modeling, we introduce the Conditional Information Enhancement Module (CIEM). We also constructed AMD (Amadeus MIDI Dataset)—the largest open-source symbolic music dataset to date—supporting both pre-training and fine-tuning. We trained two models of different scales, Amadeus and Amadeus-M, and conducted extensive experiments, demonstrating substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods across both objective and subjective metrics.

Amadeus: Autoregressive Model with Bidirectional Attribute Modelling for Symbolic Music

Transformer-based embedding models suffer from quadratic computational and linear memory complexity, limiting their utility for long sequences. We propose recurrent architectures as an efficient alternative, introducing a vertically chunked inference strategy that enables fast embedding generation with memory usage that becomes constant in the input length once it exceeds the vertical chunk size. By fine-tuning Mamba2 models, we demonstrate their viability as general-purpose text embedders, achieving competitive performance across a range of benchmarks while maintaining a substantially smaller memory footprint compared to transformer-based counterparts. We empirically validate the applicability of our inference strategy to Mamba2, RWKV, and xLSTM models, confirming consistent runtime-memory trade-offs across architectures and establishing recurrent models as a compelling alternative to transformers for efficient embedding generation.

 Linear-Time and Constant-Memory Text Embeddings Based on Recurrent Language Models

Many _in-silico_ simulations of human survey responses with large language models (LLMs) focus on generating closed-ended survey responses, whereas LLMs are typically trained to generate open-ended text instead. Previous research has used a diverse range of methods for generating closed-ended survey responses with LLMs and a standard practice remains to be identified. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact that various **Survey Response Generation Methods** have on predicted survey responses. We present the results of 32 mio. simulated survey responses across 8 Survey Response Generation Methods, 4 political attitude surveys, and 10 open-weight language models. We find significant differences between the Survey Response Generation Methods in both individual-level and subpopulation-level alignment. Our results show that Restricted Generation Methods perform best overall, and that reasoning output does not consistently improve alignment. Our work underlines the significant impact that Survey Response Generation Methods have on simulated survey responses, and we develop practical recommendations on the application of Survey Response Generation Methods.

Survey Response Generation: Generating Closed-Ended Survey Responses In-Silico with Large Language Models

Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent work integrates these capabilities into the IR field, spanning the entire pipeline from benchmarks to retrievers and rerankers. Despite this progress, the field lacks a systematic framework to organize current efforts and articulate a clear path forward. To provide a clear roadmap for this rapidly growing yet fragmented area, this survey (1) systematizes existing RIR benchmarks by knowledge domains and modalities, providing a detailed analysis of the current landscape; (2) introduces a structured taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline, alongside an analysis of their trade-offs and practical applications; and (3) summarizes challenges and future directions to guide research in this evolving field.

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