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Answering real-world geospatial questions---such as finding restaurants along a travel route or amenities near a landmark---requires reasoning over both geographic relationships and semantic user intent. However, existing large language models (LLMs) lack spatial computing capabilities and access to up-to-date, ubiquitous real-world geospatial data, while traditional geospatial systems fall short in interpreting natural language. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial-RAG, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for geospatial question answering. Spatial-RAG integrates structured spatial databases with LLMs via a hybrid spatial retriever that combines sparse spatial filtering and dense semantic matching. It formulates the answering process as a multi-objective optimization over spatial and semantic relevance, identifying Pareto-optimal candidates and dynamically selecting the best response based on user intent. Experiments across multiple tourism and map-based QA datasets show that Spatial-RAG significantly improves performance over strong baselines.

ACL 2026

Spatial-RAG: Spatial Retrieval Augmented Generation for Real-World Geospatial Reasoning Questions

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.

poster

LLMs show promise in code generation, yet their effectiveness for IT automation tasks, particularly for tools like Ansible, remains understudied. Existing benchmarks rely primarily on synthetic tasks that fail to capture the needs of practitioners who use IT automation tools. We present ExITBench (Execution-based IT Automation Benchmark), a benchmark of 126 diverse tasks (e.g., configuring servers and managing files) in which each task captures state reconciliation - a core property of IT automation tools. ExITBench evaluates LLMs' ability to generate functional Ansible automation scripts via dynamic execution in controlled environments. We evaluate 14 open-source and 3 proprietary LLMs and find that GPT-4.1-Mini achieves the best pass@10 rate of 23.9\%, while Claude-3.5-Sonnet achieves the best pass@1 performance. To explain the low performance, we analyze 1,517 execution failures across the evaluated LLMs and identify two prevalent semantic error categories: failures in state-reconciliation reasoning (42.117\% combined from variable (12.287\%), host (10.363\%), path (10.511\%), and template (8.956\%) issues) and deficiencies in module-specific execution knowledge (26.203\% combined from attribute \& parameter (17.617\%) and module (8.586\%) errors). Our findings reveal key limitations in LLMs' ability to address state reconciliation and apply specialized module knowledge, indicating that reliable IT automation with LLM-based agents need major advances in state reasoning and domain-specific execution.

Large Language Models for IT Automation Tasks: Are We There Yet?

While recent safety guardrails effectively suppress overtly biased outputs, subtler forms of social bias emerge during complex logical reasoning tasks that evade current evaluation benchmarks. To fill this gap, we introduce a new evaluation framework, PRIME ($\textbf{P}$uzzle $\textbf{R}$easoning for $\textbf{I}$mplicit Biases in $\textbf{M}$odel $\textbf{E}$valuation), that uses logic grid puzzles to systematically probe the influence of social stereotypes on logical reasoning and decision making in LLMs. Our use of logic puzzles enables automatic generation and verification, as well as variability in complexity and biased settings. PRIME includes stereotypical, anti-stereotypical, and neutral puzzle variants generated from a shared puzzle structure, allowing for controlled and fine-grained comparisons. We evaluate multiple model families across puzzle sizes and test the effectiveness of prompt-based mitigation strategies. Focusing our experiments on gender stereotypes, our findings highlight that models consistently reason more accurately when solutions align with stereotypical associations. This demonstrates the significance of PRIME for diagnosing and quantifying social biases perpetuated in the deductive reasoning of LLMs, where fairness is critical.

Evaluating Implicit Biases in LLM Reasoning through Logic Grid Puzzles

Clinical named entity recognition (NER) remains difficult to scale due to the high cost of manual annotation. Although large language models (LLMs) enable zero-shot annotation, their performance on clinical NER is still limited. To this end, we improve the annotation quality by aggregating annotations from *a herd of diverse LLMs*, including general-purpose, medically adapted, and NER-specialized models. A key challenge in this multi-LLM setting is effectively leveraging entities extracted by only a minority of models: although they account for a substantial portion of true positives, they are heavily intermixed with noise. To address this, we introduce **MARY**, a label-modeling method for **M**ulti-LLM **A**nnotation using **R**epresentation learning to capture contextual similarit**Y**. During aggregation, MARY selectively incorporates minority-extracted entities whose contexts are similar to those of majority-extracted entities, yielding more reliable and comprehensive annotations. Experimental results show that MARY improves the average F1 score by 8.6% over vanilla zero-shot baselines while reducing annotation costs.

A Herd of Language Models Makes a Better Zero-shot Annotator for Clinical Named Entity Recognition

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a model and when to defer to fallback mechanisms. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of calibration in two widely used fine-tuning paradigms: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). We show that while RLVR improves task performance, it produces extremely overconfident models, whereas SFT yields substantially better calibration, even under distribution shift, though with smaller performance gains. Through targeted experiments, we diagnose RLVR’s failure, showing that decision tokens act as extraction steps of the decision in reasoning traces and do not carry confidence information, which prevents reinforcement learning from surfacing calibrated alternatives. Based on this insight, we propose a calibration-aware reinforcement learning formulation that directly adjusts decision-token probabilities. Our method preserves RLVR’s accuracy level while mitigating overconfidence, reducing ECE scores up to 9 points.

Balancing Classification and Calibration Performance in Decision-Making LLMs via Calibration Aware Reinforcement Learning

Sensitive personal information can appear in large-scale pre-training corpora for large language models (LLMs). Detecting and filtering such information is therefore essential to ensure compliance with privacy regulations and prevent unintended information leakage. However, in contrast to English and other languages, research into sensitive personal information has been limited in the Japanese language. In this study, we focus on sensitive personal data defined as special care-required personal information (SCPI) under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI). We construct an SCPI dataset using LLM-based annotation and train machine learning models to rapidly detect SCPI in text. As a result, our SCPI classifier can effectively identify information related to SCPI. This study is the first to explore SCPI detection in Japanese text corpora, highlighting the challenges of accurate detection.

Detecting Sensitive Personal Information in Japanese Pre-Training Corpora for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used as evaluators in various applications, but the reliability of the outcomes remains a challenge. One such challenge is using LLMs-as-judges for direct assessment, i.e., assigning scores from a specified range without any references. Using summarization as our primary testbed, we first show that this challenge stems from LLM judge outputs being associated with score range bias, i.e., LLM judge outputs are highly sensitive to pre-defined score ranges. We also show that similar biases exist among models from the same family. We then mitigate this bias through contrastive decoding, achieving up to 11.7% relative improvement in Spearman correlation with human judgments, averaged across score ranges.

Contrastive Decoding Mitigates Score Range Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge

Modern generative models still lack human-level creativity, particularly in multi-branch diversity. Prior approaches to address this problem often incur heavy computation or strong dependency on model architecture. Therefore, we introduce **UAG**(**U**niversal **A**voidance **G**eneration), a model-agnostic and computationally efficient generation strategy that penalizes similarity among previously generated outputs. Thus, UAG can enhance multi-branch diversity across both diffusion and transformer models, with minimal additional computation. In experiments, our method achieves up to 1.9 times higher diversity, runs 4.4 times faster, and requires only 1/64 of the FLOPs compared to state-of-the-art methods.

A Universal Avoidance Method for Diverse Multi-branch Generation

Large language model agents heavily rely on external memory to support knowledge reuse and complex reasoning tasks. Yet most memory systems store experiences in a single global retrieval pool which can gradually dilute or corrupt stored knowledge. This problem is especially pronounced for small language models (SLMs), which are highly vulnerable to irrelevant context. We introduce CLAG, a CLustering-based AGentic memory framework where an agent actively organizes memory. CLAG employs an SLM-agent driven router to assign each new memory to a semantically coherent cluster. By performing continual evolution within the cluster, it effectively reduces cross-topic interference. During the retrieval phase, CLAG targets a small set of relevant clusters for retrieval, thereby excluding distractors and reducing the search space. Experiments on multiple QA datasets with three SLM backbones show that CLAG consistently improves answer quality and robustness over prior memory systems for agents, remaining lightweight and efficient.

CLAG: Adaptive Memory Organization via Agent-Driven Clustering for Small Language Model Agents

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on standard image-text tasks, yet their potential for visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) remains largely unexplored. VP-QA presents unique challenges where users query next-step actions by uploading images for intermediate states of complex procedures. To systematically evaluate VLMs on this practical task, we propose ProcedureVQA, a novel multimodal benchmark specifically designed for visual procedural reasoning. Through comprehensive analysis, we identify two critical limitations in current VLMs: inadequate cross-modal retrieval of structured procedures given visual states, and misalignment between image sequence granularity and textual step decomposition. To address these issues, we present Chain-of-Procedure (CoP), a hierarchical reasoning framework that first retrieves relevant instructions using visual cues, then performs step refinement through semantic decomposition, and finally generates the next step. Experiments across six VLMs demonstrate CoP's effectiveness, achieving up to 13% absolute improvement over standard baselines.

Chain-of-Procedure: Hierarchical Visual-Language Reasoning for Procedural QA

Self-conditioning has been central to the success of continuous diffusion language models, as it allows models to correct previous errors. Yet its ability degrades precisely in the regime where diffusion is most attractive for deployment: few-step sampling for fast inference. In this study, we show that when models only have a few denoising steps, inaccurate self-conditioning induces a substantial approximation gap; this mistake compounds across denoising steps and ultimately dominate the sample quality. To address this, we propose a novel training framework that handles these errors during learning by perturbing the self-conditioning signal to match inference noise, improving robustness to prior estimation errors. In addition, we introduce a token-level noise-awareness mechanism that prevents training from saturation, hence improving optimization. Extensive experiments across conditional generation benchmarks demonstrate that our framework surpasses standard continuous diffusion models while providing up to 400x faster inference speed, and remains competitive against other one-step diffusion frameworks.

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Large Language Models for IT Automation Tasks: Are We There Yet?

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