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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.

ACL 2026

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

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

technical paper

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

Beyond Variance: Knowledge-Aware LLM Compression via Fisher-Aligned Subspace Diagnostics

Detecting hate speech in online communities is increasingly challenging due to the implicit and context-dependent nature of toxic expressions. While text-only models often struggle with such ambiguity, incorporating user interaction signals offers critical pragmatic context for disambiguation. However, research in this direction is hindered by the scarcity of datasets that align textual content with comprehensive user behavioral graphs. To bridge this gap, we present a new dataset collected from a real-world community, featuring labeled hate speech enriched with fine-grained interaction histories. We further propose a novel user-aware hate speech detection framework that effectively fuses textual semantics with social interaction representations. Experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong text-only baselines by over 3.6\%, validating the critical role of social context in enhancing detection accuracy. Furthermore, to mitigate real-world adversarial risks such as graph spoofing and spam, we introduce a contrastive graph augmentation strategy, ensuring model robustness against unreliable community behaviors.

Improving Hate Speech Detection by Fusing Textual and User Interaction Representations in Online Communities

The demand for efficient large language model inference has spurred interest in sparsification, yet current hardware support remains narrowly focused on 2:4 weight sparsity. In this work, we argue that activation sparsity despite being overlooked in hardware design offers a promising path for dynamic, input-adaptive compression with significant I/O and memory benefits. We present a comprehensive post-training study of $N{:}M$ activation pruning across four LLMs (Llama2-7B-chat, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Gemma3-4B-Instruct), demonstrating that activation pruning consistently outperforms weight pruning at matched sparsity levels. We evaluate lightweight, plug-and-play error mitigation and selection strategies that require minimal or no calibration data across four sparsity patterns: 2:4, 4:8, 8:16, and 16:32. Among these, 16:32 approaches the performance of unstructured 50\% sparsity and is is approximately 2.7$\times$ better than 2:4, while 8:16 offers an optimal balance of accuracy and practicality. Our results provide evidence that next-generation accelerators should consider native support for $N{:}M$ activation sparsity and can serve as a strong baseline for the future methods.

Motivating Next-Gen Accelerators with Flexible Activation Sparsity via Benchmarking Lightweight Post-Training Sparsification Approaches

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) are pivotal in industrial applications for their ability to scale performance efficiently. However, standard MoEs enforce uniform expert sizes, creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. While heterogeneous expert architectures attempt to address this by diversifying expert sizes, they often suffer from significant system-level challenges, specifically unbalanced GPU utilization and inefficient parameter utilization, which hinder practical deployment.
To bridge the gap between theoretical heterogeneity and robust industrial application, we propose Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts (MoHGE) which introduces a two-level routing mechanism to enable flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. To optimize inference efficiency, we propose a Group-Wise Auxiliary Loss, which dynamically steers tokens to the most parameter-efficient expert groups based on task difficulty.
To address the critical deployment challenge of GPU load balancing, we introduce an All-size Group-decoupling Allocation strategy coupled with an Intra-Group Experts Auxiliary Loss. These mechanisms collectively ensure uniform computation distribution across GPUs.
Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MoHGE matches the performance of MoE architectures while reducing the total parameters by approximately 20\% and maintaining balanced GPU utilization. Our work establishes a scalable paradigm for resource-efficient MoE design, offering a practical solution for optimizing inference costs in real-world scenarios.

Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts for Language Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in downstream industries, yet aligning proprietary agents remains challenging due to limited high-quality data and hardware constraints in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
We propose EfficientTool, a cost-effective, tool-conditioned alignment framework forming a closed loop over data collection, iterative training, and deployment-oriented evaluation.
EfficientTool adopts a self-evolving bootstrapping-based Trajectory Collection Pipeline for high-quality trajectory generation, followed by iterative Model Training Pipeline using tool-conditioned parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).
We evaluate the model with Interaction and Evaluation Pipeline in public and private benchmarks, and deploy for an internal enterprise agent.
Results show that EfficientTool effectively aligns model in SME scenarios while preserving general tool-calling capability.

EfficientTool: A Cost-Effective Aligning Framework for Tool-Conditioned Agents in SME Scenarios

As large language models (LLMs) grow in size, efficient compression techniques like quantization and sparsification are critical. While quantization maintains performance with reduced precision, structured sparsity methods, such as N:M sparsification, often fall short due to limited flexibility and sensitivity to outlier weights. We explore 8:16 semi-structured sparsity, demonstrating its ability to surpass the Performance Threshold---where a compressed model matches the accuracy of its uncompressed or smaller counterpart under equivalent memory constraints. Compared to 2:4 sparsity, 8:16 offers greater flexibility with minimal storage overhead (0.875 vs. 0.75 bits/element). We also apply sparse structured patterns for salient weights, showing that structured sparsity for outliers is competitive with unstructured approaches, leading to equivalent or better results. Finally, we demonstrate that simple techniques such as variance correction and SmoothQuant-like weight equalization improve sparse models performance.

From 2:4 to 8:16 sparcity patterns in LLMs for Outliers and Weights with Variance Correction

Production LLMs must balance modeling quality with predictable latency, stable accelerator utilization, and cost-efficient scaling—constraints that remain difficult for existing architectures. Transformers provide strong reasoning but incur quadratic complexity, while state-space models (SSMs) scale efficiently yet lack fine-grained interactions; prior hybrids either introduce sequential bottlenecks or rely on learned routing that complicates deployment. We present FlowHN, a deployment-oriented parallel hybrid architecture that enables deterministic conditional computation via FLOP-aware token circulation across attention and SSM branches. Instead of dynamic expert routing, FlowHN performs hardware-aligned token scheduling that balances workloads, reduces synchronization stalls, and preserves full parameter utilization. Across 135M–1B models, FlowHN achieves up to 4× higher throughput and 15% higher MFU than strong Transformer, SSM, and hybrid baselines while maintaining competitive accuracy on reasoning, coding, and long-context tasks up to 32K tokens. FlowHN is designed to integrate directly into existing Hybrid pipelines without changes to optimizers, training stacks, or inference serving infrastructure, making it practical for real-world deployment.

FlowHN: Adaptive Token Routing for Efficient Parallel Hybrid Networks

NL2SQL systems deployed in industry settings often encounter ambiguous or unanswerable queries, especially in interactive scenarios with incomplete user clarifications. Existing benchmarks typically assume a single point of ambiguity and typically rely on users to resolve them via interactions, overlooking realistic failure modes. We introduce CLARITY, a framework that automatically generates ambiguous and unanswerable NL2SQL benchmark with multi-faceted ambiguity and diverse user behaviour in both single- and multi-turn settings. Using a constraint-driven pipeline, CLARITY transforms executable SQL into ambiguous queries augmented with grounded conversational continuations and schema-level metadata. Empirical evaluation on Spider and BIRD indicates that leading NL2SQL systems (based on strong LLMs) exhibit pronounced performance degradation under multi-faceted ambiguity. They frequently flag ambiguous inputs but fail to accurately localize or disambiguate the underlying schema-level sources, underscoring the need for further industry-focused research on robust ambiguity detection and resolution in NL2SQL bolstered by this work.

CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems

Related search query recommendation is essential for enhancing user engagement and information discovery on digital platforms. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted the field toward generative retrieval, existing methods suffer from two primary limitations: (1) pointwise generation via beam search often leads to semantic redundancy and wasted retrieval quota, and (2) current listwise approaches lack explicit reasoning, relying on superficial click-through rate (CTR) rewards. In this paper, we propose ReList, a novel framework that transforms related search into a reasoning-enhanced listwise generation task. ReList follows a two-stage training paradigm: first, Reasoning Activation constructs a high-quality dataset by back-translating diverse query lists into Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales; second, Alternative Training iteratively evolves the model using Reinforcement Learning with a Gated Multi-Objective Reward and a Corrective SFT mechanism to handle hard samples. Experimental results on real-world search benchmarks and online A/B tests demonstrate that ReList significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both query diversity and user engagement, providing more insightful and logically grounded query recommendations.

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LOTUS: Evolving Multimodal Unlearning via Hyperbolic Entailment and Lorentz Transport

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