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Existing datasets for evaluating text-to-image generation focus mostly on real-life images, which poses challenges for assessing academic
figure generation given real scientific captions, which is a hot topic in AI for Science. To fill the gap, we propose HE4AFG, a novel dataset
which first provides a Holistic Evaluation for Academic caption-to-Figure Generation (AFG). Specifically, HE4AFG collects real figure captions from 8 scientific domains and finally generates 3,900 evaluation samples (particularly, including multi-panel figures) using 5 mainstream large multimodal models (LMMs). For each sample, we provide high-quality human ratings in terms of three aspects—scientific aesthetic (SA), topic relevance (TR), and attribute correctness (AC). Moreover, we present two trainable models: (1) HE4AFG-E, an automated Evaluation model for AFG, which generates aspect-aware training examples and then use them to train three aspect-specific evaluation modules via contrastive learning; (2) HE4AFG-R, an automated Refinement model, which generates and utilizes feedback on the quality of the figures (e.g., unfaithful elements) to continuously improve AFG. Extensive experiments on HE4AFG demonstrate the effectiveness and performance advantages of our models.

ACL 2026

Automatic and Reliable Evaluation for Academic Caption-to-Figure Generation with LMMs

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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. <br>
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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.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR trains LLMs on all generated tokens, rather than exploring which tokens actually contribute to reasoning. We propose AIPO(Adaptive--Information Policy Optimization), which focuses updates on those decisive tokens discovered on the fly. AIPO estimates each hidden state’s mutual information to score tokens. Policy gradients are then computed only on these critical tokens, using an advantage that blends information gain and verifiable correctness. To improve the efficiency of mutual-information estimation, AIPO adopts a Random–Fourier approximation of the Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion. Across five math and science benchmarks, AIPO yields up to +20% accuracy over strong RLVR baselines while updating merely 10% of tokens, demonstrating superior efficiency and effectiveness. Our findings highlight the importance of information–driven token selection for efficient and effective reinforcement learning of LLM reasoning.

AIPO: Adaptive Information Guided Token-Level Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Reasoning

Cross-lingual learning enables the transfer of structured sentiment knowledge from high-resource languages to unlabeled or low-resource languages, but prior work has largely focused on coarse-grained sentiment classification or aspect extraction. In contrast, zero-shot cross-lingual aspect--opinion--sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE), which extracts sentiment triplets of the form $(\textit{aspect term}, \textit{opinion term}, \textit{sentiment polarity})$, remains underexplored. We propose a unified framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as both structured pseudo-label generators and semantic teachers for ASTE. Our approach employs stepwise structured prompting over aspect- and opinion-aware code-switched variants to generate reliable pseudo triplets, followed by a multi-variant consistency filter to retain high-confidence supervision. We further introduce a triplet-aware contrastive distillation objective that aligns student triplet representations with LLM-encoded semantic embeddings. During inference, only the student ASTE model is used, without requiring LLM access. Experiments on four non-Indic and four low-resource Indic target languages show consistent improvements over strong cross-lingual and LLM-based baselines. The proposed method yields an absolute micro-F1 improvement of 5.3 points on non-Indic languages and 3.8 points on low-resource Indic languages compared to the best competing approach. Ablation results further validate the complementary roles of aspect- and opinion-aware code-switched prompting and triplet-aware contrastive distillation, with larger relative gains observed in low-resource Indic settings.

CLAOCS-TX: Cross-Lingual Triplet Extraction with Aspect-Opinion-Aware Code-Switched Prompting and LLM-Guided Contrastive Distillation

Mobile GUI agents powered by LMMs can perceive screens and follow instructions, yet existing benchmarks largely target short, linear workflows and step-level accuracy, offering limited insight into long-horizon planning and decision-making under branching structures. We present DAC-Bench, a decision-aware benchmark with compositional tasks comprising 830 episodes and 11,345 action steps across 35 applications on Android and iOS. Tasks are organized into Sequential, Conjunctive, Conditional, and Hierarchical structures, reflecting real-world multi-step and branching interaction patterns. To complement standard step-level evaluation, we introduce weighted longest common subsequence to capture length-sensitive progress and decision accuracy for branch correctness. Evaluations across 7 diverse agents show substantial performance degradation compared to prior benchmarks, with success rates dropping below 5% on 6–8 step tasks and branch accuracy averaging 38%, highlighting challenges in conditional decision-making. By exposing these failure modes, DAC-Bench provides a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for advancing decision-aware mobile GUI agents. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/YuqingZhangMirror12/DAC-Bench.

DAC-Bench: A Decision-Aware Benchmark for Compositional Mobile GUI Tasks

Harmonized System (HS) code classification is a hierarchically structured and regulation-constrained task, often complicated by short and noisy product descriptions. Misclassification can lead to tariff misapplication, regulatory violations, or delayed customs clearance, which in turn requires predictions to be both semantically appropriate and hierarchically valid. While large language models (LLMs) show strong semantic understanding, their unconstrained generation is poorly aligned with these requirements, often producing non-existent or hierarchically inconsistent codes. We propose HSGraphAgent a knowledge-graph-guided LLM framework that formulates HS classification as a stepwise, regulation-aware reasoning process over an explicit HS knowledge graph. By encoding hierarchical containment relations and regulatory exclusion rules, and enforcing them through a Select-Redirect mechanism, HSGraphAgent constrains inference to legally valid paths while producing explicit and traceable reasoning trajectories. Experiments on taxonomy-wide 4-digit and fine-grained 6-digit HS benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over direct generation and retrieval-augmented baselines, with particularly strong gains in fine-grained and regulation-sensitive classification settings.

HSGraphAgent: Knowledge-Graph-Guided Large Language Models for Harmonized System Code Classification

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for closed-ended tasks, extending it to open-ended social language games via self-play reveals a critical issue: evolution impasse. Due to the vast strategy space, language agents frequently converge to homogenized behaviors, leading to deterministic match outcomes that eliminate the gradient signals necessary for policy evolution. To tackle this issue, we propose Dual-scale Evolutionary Policy Training (DEPT) for social language games. DEPT introduces a time-scaled evolutionary perception mechanism that detects impasse by quantifying dual-scale value baseline divergence alongside match entropy. Upon perceiving the collapse, it then activates asymmetric advantage reshaping to dynamically modulate the optimization landscape for intervention. Thus, our method effectively restores gradient signals and enforces sustained strategic exploration. Extensive experiments on multiple social language games demonstrate that DEPT outperforms strong baselines, avoiding policy degeneration and driving the continuous evolution of social language agents.

Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents

Automatic legal judgment prediction (LJP) has recently received increasing attention in the natural language processing community because of its practical values in the real world. Significant progress has been achieved on LJP in the past decade. However, most existing LJP research primarily focuses on developing methods that achieve better performance on standard evaluation datasets, with limited emphasis on the long-term advancement of the field beyond improving evaluation metrics. In this position paper, we reflect on the state of the art in LJP research, and explore issues that should motivate researchers to think beyond merely enhancing performance metrics, with the ultimate goal of sparking discussions among LJP researchers about the future trajectory of the field.

Legal Judgment Prediction: A Reflection on the State of the Art

Large language model (LLM) agents that follow the sequential “reason-then-act” paradigm have achieved superior performance in many complex tasks. However, these methods suffer from limited exploration and incomplete environmental understanding, as they interact with only a single environment per step. In this paper, we first introduce a novel paradigm that enables an agent to interact with multiple environments simultaneously and share cross-trajectory experiences. Build upon this paradigm, we further propose Diverse Parallel Exploration Policy Optimization (DPEPO), a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that encourages the agent to perform diverse parallel exploration. There are two stages in DPEPO: initial supervised fine-tuning (SFT) imparts basic parallel reasoning and action generation, followed by reinforcement learning stage with a hierarchical reward scheme. We design a parallel trajectory-level success reward and two step-level rewards: Diverse Action Reward and Diverse State Transition Reward, which actively penalize behavioral redundancy and promote broad exploration. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that DPEPO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates, while maintaining comparable efficiency to strong sequential baselines.

DPEPO: Diverse Parallel Exploration Policy Optimization for LLM-based Agents

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse and potentially conflicting human values necessitates navigating complex multi-objective landscapes. However, existing prompt-conditioned approaches face a critical training-inference discrepancy: they rely on ground-truth scores during training while requiring manual user-specification at inference. We introduce prediction of implicit preferences to bridge this gap while reducing user burden. To this end, we propose Self-Guided Alignment (SGA), a framework that transforms passive reward dependency into an intrinsic adaptive sensing capability. It employs a dual-head architecture to unify preference internalization with conditional generation, enabling the model to learn a latent mapping between raw prompts and preference profiles. Through adaptive preference sensing, the model autonomously predicts the latent preference score to self-guide the generation, thereby eliminating the need for manual specification at inference. Extensive experiments across diverse model scales demonstrate that SGA often outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior multi-objective trade-offs and improved preference alignment. 
Code is available at https://github.com/python-yyds/SGA.

Self-Guided Alignment: Adaptive Preference Sensing for Multi-Objective Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face critical privacy challenges due to the indiscriminate memorization of sensitive data. Existing unlearning methods, largely adapted from Euclidean paradigms, suffer from a geometric mismatch: they fail to disentangle specific instances from general concepts, causing catastrophic forgetting or unsafe substitution. We introduce LOTUS (Lorentz Transport for Unlearning Strategies), a framework for surgical semantic pruning within the Lorentz manifold. Leveraging hyperbolic geometry's hierarchical nature, LOTUS employs an Inverted Entailment Cone Loss to sever the inheritance of sensitive concepts and a Lorentz Transport mechanism to align pruned features within the tangent space, ensuring compatibility with Euclidean backbones via a safety refusal prior. Experiments on MLLMU-Bench with LLaVA and Qwen show that LOTUS significantly outperforms baselines, effectively erasing targeted visual data while preserving general utility.

LOTUS: Evolving Multimodal Unlearning via Hyperbolic Entailment and Lorentz Transport

Post-training activation compression is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained hardware. However, standard methods like Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are gradient-blind: they preserve high-variance dimensions regardless of their impact on factual knowledge preservation. We introduce Fisher-Aligned Subspace Compression (FASC), a knowledge-aware compression framework that selects subspaces by directly modeling activation-gradient coupling, minimizing a second-order surrogate of the loss function. FASC leverages the Fisher Information Matrix to identify dimensions critical for factual knowledge, which often reside in low-variance but high-gradient-sensitivity subspaces. We propose the Dependence Violation Score (ρ) as a general-purpose diagnostic metric that quantifies activation-gradient coupling, revealing where factual knowledge is stored within transformer architectures. Extensive experiments on Mistral-7B and Llama-3-8B demonstrate that FASC preserves 6–8% more accuracy on knowledge-intensive benchmarks (MMLU, LAMA) compared to variance-based methods at 50% rank reduction, effectively enabling a 7B model to match the factual recall of a 13B uncompressed model. Our analysis reveals that ρ serves as a fundamental signal of stored knowledge, with high-ρ layers emerging only when models internalize factual associations during training

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AIPO: Adaptive Information Guided Token-Level Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Reasoning

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SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures