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A practical large language model (LLM) service may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across requests. However, the long system prompt causes throughput/latency bottlenecks as the cost of generating the next token grows w.r.t the sequence length. This paper aims to improve the efficiency of LLM services that involve long system prompts. Our key observation is that handling these system prompts requires heavily redundant memory accesses in existing causal attention computation algorithms. Specifically, for batched requests, the cached hidden states (i.e., key-value pairs) of system prompts are transferred from off-chip DRAM to on-chip SRAM multiple times, each corresponding to an individual request. To eliminate such a redundancy, we propose RelayAttention, an attention algorithm that allows reading these hidden states from DRAM exactly once for a batch of input tokens. RelayAttention is a free lunch: it maintains the generation quality while requiring no model retraining, as it is based on a mathematical reformulation of causal attention. We have observed significant performance improvements to a production-level system, vLLM, through integration with RelayAttention. The improvements are even more profound with longer system prompts.

ACL 2024

RelayAttention for Efficient Large Language Model Serving with Long System Prompts

io-awareness

llm serving

attention

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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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising results in language generation and instruction following but frequently "hallucinate", making their outputs less reliable. Despite Uncertainty Quantification's (UQ) potential solutions, implementing it accurately within LLMs is challenging. Our research introduces a simple heuristic: not all tokens in auto-regressive LLM text equally represent the underlying meaning, as "linguistic redundancy" often allows a few keywords to convey the essence of long sentences. However, current methods underestimate this inequality when assessing uncertainty, causing tokens with limited semantics to be equally or excessively weighted in UQ. To correct this, we propose Shifting Attention to more Relevant (SAR) components at both token- and sentence-levels for better UQ. We conduct extensive experiments involving a range of popular "off-the-shelf" LLMs, such as Vicuna, WizardLM, and LLaMA-2-chat, with model sizes extending up to 33B parameters. We evaluate various free-form question-answering tasks, encompassing domains such as reading comprehension, science Q&A, and medical Q&A. Our experimental results, coupled with a comprehensive demographic analysis, demonstrate the superior performance of SAR. The code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/SAR.

Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Models

Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors---human or AI---to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large language models' (LLMs') intention understanding by examining their responses to non-literal utterances. Ideally, an LLM should respond in line with the true intention of a non-literal utterance, not its literal interpretation. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to generate contextually relevant responses to non-literal language. We also find that providing oracle intentions substantially improves response appropriateness, but using chain-of-thought to make models spell out intentions before responding improves much less. These findings suggest that LLMs are not yet pragmatic interlocutors, and that explicitly modeling intention could improve LLM responses to non-literal language.

Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs

With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in texts that were written by humans, particularly uncovering the underlying discourse structures of texts beyond their surface structures. Introducing a novel methodology, we leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to unveil distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. Empirical findings demonstrate that, although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. Notably, incorporating hierarchical discourse features enhances binary classifiers' overall performance in distinguishing between human-written and machine-generated texts, even on out-of-distribution and paraphrased samples. This underscores the significance of incorporating hierarchical discourse features in the analysis of text patterns. The code and dataset will be available at [TBA].

Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs

This work introduces an original and practical paradigm for narrative comprehension, stemming from the characteristics that individual passages within narratives tend to be more cohesively related than isolated.
Complementary to the common end-to-end paradigm, we propose a fine-grained modeling of narrative context, by formulating a graph dubbed NarCo, which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by various downstream tasks. In particular, edges in NarCo encompass free-form retrospective questions between context snippets, inspired by human cognitive perception that constantly reinstates relevant events from prior context. Importantly, our graph formalism is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations, through our designed two-stage prompting scheme.
To examine the graph properties and its utility, we conduct three studies in narratives, each from a unique angle: edge relation efficacy, local context enrichment, and broader application in QA. All tasks could benefit from the explicit coherence captured by NarCo.

Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has enabled the efficient optimization of cumbersome language models in real-world settings. However, as datasets in such environments often contain noisy labels that adversely affect performance, PEFT methods are inevitably exposed to noisy labels. Despite this challenge, the adaptability of PEFT to noisy environments remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we investigate various PEFT methods under noisy labels. Interestingly, our findings reveal that PEFT has difficulty in memorizing noisy labels due to its inherently limited capacity, resulting in robustness. However, we also find that such limited capacity simultaneously makes PEFT more vulnerable to interference of noisy labels, impeding the learning of clean samples. To address this issue, we propose Clean Routing (CleaR), a novel routing-based PEFT approach that adaptively activates PEFT modules. In CleaR, PEFT modules are preferentially exposed to clean data while bypassing the noisy ones, thereby minimizing the noisy influence. To verify the efficacy of CleaR, we perform extensive experiments on diverse configurations of noisy labels. The results convincingly demonstrate that CleaR leads to substantially improved performance in noisy environments

Towards Robust and Generalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Noisy Label Learning

Transformers have become the de-facto standard for natural language processing. However, dense information flows within transformers pose significant challenges for real-time and resource-constrained devices, as computational complexity grows quadratically with sequence length. To counteract such dense information flows, we propose SparseFlow, a novel efficient method designed to sparsify the dense pathways of token representations across all transformer blocks. To this end, SparseFlow parameterizes the information flows linking token representations to transformer blocks. These parameterized information flows are optimized to be sparse, allowing only the salient information to pass through into the blocks. To validate the efficacy of SparseFlow, we conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse benchmarks (understanding and generation), scales (ranging from millions to billions), architectures (including encoders, decoders, and seq-to-seq models), and modalities (such as language-only and vision-language). The results convincingly demonstrate that sparsifying the dense information flows leads to substantial speedup gains without compromising task accuracy. For instance, SparseFlow reduces computational costs by half on average, without a significant loss in accuracy.

SparseFlow: Accelerating Transformers by Sparsifying Information Flows

LLM has achieved impressive performance on multi-modal tasks, which have received ever-increasing research attention. Recent research focuses on improving prediction performance and reliability (e.g., addressing the hallucination problem). They often prepend relevant external knowledge to the input text as an extra prompt. However, these methods would be affected by the noise in the knowledge and the context length limitation of LLM. In our work, we focus on making better use of external knowledge and propose a method to actively extract valuable information in the knowledge to produce the latent vector as a soft prompt, which is then fused with the image embedding to form a knowledge-enhanced context to instruct LLM. The experimental results on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks show that the proposed method enjoys better utilization of external knowledge and helps the model achieve better performance.

Soft Knowledge Prompt: Help External Knowledge Become a Better Teacher to Instruct LLM in Knowledge-based VQA

A pivotal advancement in the progress of large language models (LLMs) is the emergence of the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs can achieve higher performance with fewer active parameters, but it is still hard to deploy them due to their immense parameter sizes. Different from previous weight pruning methods that rely on specifically designed hardware, this paper mainly aims to enhance the deployment efficiency of MoE LLMs by introducing plug-and-play expert-level sparsification techniques. Specifically, we propose, for the first time to our best knowledge, post-training approaches for task-agnostic and task-specific expert pruning and skipping of MoE LLMs, tailored to improve deployment efficiency while maintaining model performance across a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can simultaneously reduce model sizes and increase the inference speed, while maintaining satisfactory performance. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/Expert_Sparsity.

Not All Experts are Equal: Efficient Expert Pruning and Skipping for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models

Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced is that of determining satisfiability. However, from a logical point of view, satisfiability problems vary along various dimensions, which may affect TLMs' ability to learn how to solve them. The problem instances of satisfiability in natural language can belong to different computational complexity classes depending on the language fragment in which they are expressed. Although prior research has explored the problem of natural language satisfiability, the above-mentioned point has not been discussed adequately. Hence, we investigate how problem instances from varying computational complexity classes and having different grammatical constructs impact TLMs' ability to learn rules of inference. Furthermore, to faithfully evaluate TLMs, we conduct an empirical study to explore the distribution of satisfiability problems.

Natural Language Satisfiability: Exploring the Problem Distribution and Evaluating Transformer-based Language Models

Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) has been advancing rapidly in recent times, driven by significant developments in dense passage retrieval and pretrained language models. State-of-the-art models typically incorporate the FiD framework, which is composed by a neural retriever alongside an encoder-decoder neural reader. In the answer generation process, the retriever will retrieve numerous passages (around 100 for instance), each of which is then individually encoded by the encoder. Subsequently, the decoder makes predictions based on these encoded passages. Nevertheless, this framework can be relatively time-consuming, particularly due to the extensive length of the gathered passages. To address this, we introduce FastFiD in this paper, a novel approach that executes sentence selection on the encoded passages. This aids in retaining valuable sentences while reducing the context length required for generating answers. Experiments on three commonly used datasets (Natural Questions, TriviaQA and ASQA) demonstrate that our method can enhance the inference speed by **2.3X-5.7X**, while simultaneously maintaining the model's performance. Moreover, an in-depth analysis of the model's attention reveals that the selected sentences indeed hold a substantial contribution towards the final answer. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/FastFiD.

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Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Models

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