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Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with knowledge retrieval, an approach known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), have achieved strong performance in open-domain question answering. However, RAG remains prone to hallucinations: factually incorrect outputs may arise from inaccuracies in the model&#39;s internal knowledge and the retrieved context. Existing approaches to mitigating hallucinations often conflate factuality with faithfulness to the retrieved evidence, incorrectly labeling factually correct statements as hallucinations if they are not explicitly supported by the retrieval. In this paper, we introduce FRANQ (Faithfulness-aware Retrieval-Augmented UNcertainty Quantification), a new method for hallucination detection in RAG outputs. FRANQ applies distinct uncertainty quantification techniques to estimate factuality, conditioning on whether a statement is faithful to the retrieved context. To evaluate FRANQ and competing uncertainty quantification methods, we construct a new long-form question answering dataset annotated for both factuality and faithfulness, combining automated labeling with manual validation of challenging cases. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, tasks, and LLMs show that FRANQ achieves more accurate detection of factual errors in RAG-generated responses compared to existing uncertainty quantification and hallucination detection approaches.

ACL 2026

 Faithfulness-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for Fact-Checking the Output of Retrieval-Augmented Generation

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with knowledge retrieval, an approach known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), have achieved strong performance in open-domain question answering. However, RAG remains prone to hallucinations: factually incorrect outputs may arise from inaccuracies in the model's internal knowledge and the retrieved context. Existing approaches to mitigating hallucinations often conflate factuality with faithfulness to the retrieved evidence, incorrectly labeling factually correct statements as hallucinations if they are not explicitly supported by the retrieval. In this paper, we introduce FRANQ (Faithfulness-aware Retrieval-Augmented UNcertainty Quantification), a new method for hallucination detection in RAG outputs. FRANQ applies distinct uncertainty quantification techniques to estimate factuality, conditioning on whether a statement is faithful to the retrieved context. To evaluate FRANQ and competing uncertainty quantification methods, we construct a new long-form question answering dataset annotated for both factuality and faithfulness, combining automated labeling with manual validation of challenging cases. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, tasks, and LLMs show that FRANQ achieves more accurate detection of factual errors in RAG-generated responses compared to existing uncertainty quantification and hallucination detection approaches.

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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.

In deployed large language models (LLMs), inference energy consumption has grown rapidly and has emerged as a key bottleneck in large-scale deployment, yet most existing inference efficiency methods focus on reducing FLOPs or latency, rather than explicitly modeling or enforcing end-to-end inference energy constraints. We propose EOP-LLM, an energy-oriented dynamic pruning framework that enables LLM inference under explicit per-sequence energy budgets. EOP-LLM combines a device-calibrated energy proxy with lightweight token and feed-forward (FFN) selectors, coordinated through a global dual variable, to dynamically allocate computation while preserving model quality. Extensive experiments on LLaMA 3.2 (1B/3B) and LLaMA 3.1 (8B) demonstrate that EOP-LLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic pruning baselines under matched energy budgets, while strictly adhering to per-sequence energy constraints.

EOP-LLM: Energy Oriented Pruning for Large Language Models

A line of work in planning uses LLM not to generate a plan, but to generate a formal representation in some planning language, which can be input into a symbolic solver to deterministically find a plan. While showing improved trust and promising performance, dozens of recent publications have proposed scattered methods on a variety of benchmarks under different experimental settings. We attempt to unify the inference-time LLM-as-formalizer methodology for classical planning by proposing a unifying organizational framework based on intermediate representations. We thus systematically evaluate more than a dozen pipelines that subsume most existing work, while proposing novel ones that involve syntactically similar but high-resource intermediate languages (such as a Python wrapper of PDDL). We provide recipes for planning language generation pipelines, draw a series of conclusions showing the efficacy of their various components, and evidence their robustness against problem complexity.

Unifying Inference-Time Planning Language Generation

AI systems are fallible, and humans can make mistakes in deciding whether to trust
AI over their own judgment. Thus, improving human-AI collaboration requires that we understand when,
why, and how humans decide to rely on AI. We study two reliance decisions: delegating a task to
AI without seeing its output (whether AI is used) and evaluating AI suggestions to decide
whether to adopt them how AI output shapes final decisions).
Both matter for effective collaboration, yet prior work lacks naturalistic experiments capturing both patterns
for the same users. We address this gap by studying collaborative human--AI teams competing in a
question-answering game in which humans can choose when and how to work with AI agents to win.
Our 24 matches pair 23 expert humans with 16 AI agents, capturing 387 delegation and 1440 adoption decisions.
While human--AI collaboration performs better than either AI or humans
alone, humans make suboptimal collaboration decisions, both
under-relying on correct AI suggestions (3.7\% of opportunities missed) and over-relying when AI misleads them (1.5\%).
Both parties contribute wrong answers: reported model confidence is near chance when humans and AI disagree, 
while confirmation bias drives higher under-reliance (60.7\%) when an AI suggestion agrees with humans' initial incorrect answer.

AI, Take the Wheel: What Drives Delegation and Trust in Human–Computer Cooperative Question Answering?

One paradigm of language model (LM) fine-tuning relies on creating large training datasets, under the assumption that high quantity and diversity will enable models to generalize to novel tasks after post‑training. In practice, gathering large sets of data is inefficient, and training on them is prohibitively expensive; worse, there is no guarantee that the resulting model will handle complex scenarios or generalize better. Moreover, existing techniques rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information, resulting in unnecessary costs. In this work, we explore a new Test-Time Self-Improvement (TT-SI) algorithm to create more effective and generalizable agentic LMs on-the-fly. TT-SI can be summarized in three steps: (i) first it identifies the samples that model struggles with (self-awareness), (ii) then generates similar examples from detected uncertain samples (self-data augmentation), and (iii) uses these newly generated samples at test-time training (self-improvement). We further explore Test-Time Distillation (TT-D), which leverages a stronger supervisor for targeted data generation. Empirical evaluations across different agent benchmarks demonstrate that TT-SI improves the performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across all benchmarks and surpasses other standard learning methods more efficiently. Our findings highlight the promise of TT-SI, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement algorithms at test-time as a new paradigm for building more capable agents toward self-evolution.

TT-SI: Self-Improving LLM Agents with Test-Time Training

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation, where questionnaire-based client profiles are expanded into situational stories that provide narrative context for the dialogue. Therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes selected by the interaction agent, while an interaction agent dynamically coordinates exchanges to control MI strategies during a multi-turn conversation. We propose a two-level evaluation protocol: lexical metrics and MI-specific measures of macro-level counseling strategies, alongside LLM-as-judge and human expert assessments. We construct a dataset of 6K simulated MI dialogues grounded in 1K questionnaire-story pairs, covering 12 MI codes and 13 symptom domains, and benchmark six open- and closed-source LLMs. Our results show that situational grounding and macro-level control can improve MI adherence and clinical plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of a structured multi-agent workflow for psychotherapy dialogue generation. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation

Technological progress has led to concrete advancements in tasks that were regarded as challenging, such as automatic fact-checking. Interest in adopting these systems for public health and medicine has grown due to the high-stakes nature of medical decisions and challenges in critically appraising a vast and diverse medical literature. Evidence-based medicine connects to every individual, and yet the nature of it is highly technical, rendering the medical literacy of majority users inadequate to sufficiently navigate the domain. Such problems with medical communication ripen the ground for end-to-end fact-checking agents: check a claim against current medical literature and return with an evidence-backed verdict. And yet, such systems remain largely unused.

In this position paper, developed with expert input, we present the first study examining how clinical experts verify real claims from social media by synthesizing medical evidence. In searching for this upper-bound, we reveal fundamental challenges in end-to-end fact-checking when applied to medicine: Difficulties connecting claims in the wild to scientific evidence in the form of clinical trials; ambiguities in underspecified claims mixed with mismatched intentions; and inherently subjective veracity labels. We argue that fact-checking should be approached as an interactive communication problem, rather than an end-to-end process.

Decide less, communicate more: On the construct validity of end-to-end fact-checking in medicine

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve evidence at coarse granularities (entire images or scenes), creating a mismatch with fine-grained user queries and making failures unverifiable. We introduce GranuVistaVQA, a multimodal benchmark featuring real-world landmarks with element-level annotations across multiple viewpoints, capturing the partial observation challenge where individual images contain only subsets of entities. We further propose GranuRAG, a multi-granularity framework that treats visual elements as first-class retrieval units through three stages: element-level detection and classification, multi-granularity cross-modal alignment for evidence retrieval, and attribution-constrained generation. By grounding retrieval at the element level rather than relying on implicit attention, our approach enables transparent error diagnosis. Experiments demonstrate that GranuRAG achieves up to 29.2% improvement over six strong baselines for this task.

From Scenes to Elements: Multi-Granularity Evidence Retrieval for Verifiable Multimodal RAG

Retrieving visual and textual information from medical literature and hospital records can enhance diagnostic accuracy for clinical image interpretation. However, multimodal retrieval-augmented diagnosis is highly challenging. We explore a lightweight mechanism for enhancing diagnostic performance of retrieval-augmented LVLMs. We train an LVLM-aware multimodal retriever, such that the retriever learns to return images and texts that guide the LVLM toward correct predictions. In our low-resource setting, we perform only lightweight fine-tuning with small amounts of data, and use only general-purpose backbone models, achieving competitive results in clinical classification and VQA tasks compared to medically pre-trained models with extensive training. In a novel analysis, we highlight a previously unexplored class of errors that we term inconsistent retrieval predictions: cases where different top-retrieved images yield different predictions for the same target. We find that these cases are challenging for all models, even for non-retrieval models, and that our retrieval optimization mechanism significantly improves these cases over standard RAG. However, our analysis also sheds light on gaps in the ability of LVLMs to utilize retrieved information for clinical predictions.

LVLM-Aware Multimodal Retrieval for RAG-Based Medical Diagnosis with General-Purpose Models

In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for various applications, yet their training is often hindered by barren plateaus (BPs), where gradient variance vanishes exponentially as the qubit size increases. Most initialization-based mitigation strategies rely heavily on pre-designed static parameter distributions, thereby lacking adaptability to diverse model sizes or data conditions. To address these limitations, we propose AdaInit, a foundational framework that leverages large language models with the submartingale property to iteratively synthesize initial parameters for QNNs that yield non-negligible gradient variance, thereby mitigating BPs. Unlike conventional one-shot initialization methods, AdaInit adaptively explores the parameter space by incorporating dataset characteristics and gradient feedback, with theoretical guarantees of convergence to finding a set of effective initial parameters for QNNs. We provide rigorous theoretical analyses of the submartingale-based process and empirically validate that AdaInit consistently outperforms existing initialization methods in maintaining higher gradient variance across various QNN scales. We believe this work may initiate a new avenue to mitigate BPs.

 Large Language Models Can Help Mitigate Barren Plateaus in Quantum Neural Networks

Electronic health record (EHR) question answering is often handled by LLM-based pipelines that are costly to deploy and do not explicitly leverage the hierarchical structure of clinical data. Motivated by evidence that medical ontologies and patient trajectories exhibit hyperbolic geometry, we propose HypEHR, a compact Lorentzian model that embeds codes, visits, and questions in hyperbolic space and answers queries via geometry-consistent cross-attention with type-specific pointer heads. HypEHR is pretrained with next-visit diagnosis prediction and hierarchy-aware regularization to align representations with the ICD ontology. On two MIMIC-IV-based EHR-QA benchmarks, HypEHR approaches LLM-based methods while using far fewer parameters. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/yuyuliu11037/HypEHR}.

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