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Code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in modern software development, enhancing productivity and accelerating development. This paper aims to investigate the fine-tuning of code-generating LLMs using Reinforcement Learning and Direct Preference Optimization, further improving their performance. To achieve this, we enhance the training data for the reward model with the help of symbolic execution techniques, ensuring more comprehensive and objective data. With symbolic execution, we create a custom dataset that better captures the nuances in code evaluation. Our reward models, fine-tuned on this dataset, demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline, CodeRL, in estimating the quality of generated code. Our code-generating LLMs, trained with the help of reward model feedback, achieve similar results compared to the CodeRL benchmark.

NAACL 2025

Integrating Symbolic Execution into the Fine-Tuning of Code-Generating LLMs

code generation

fine-tuning

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

poster

### 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing in-context learning (ICL) methods for relation extraction (RE) often prioritize language similarity over structural similarity, which can lead to overlooking entity relationships. To address this, we propose an AMR-enhanced retrieval-based ICL method for RE. Our model retrieves in-context examples based on semantic structure similarity between task inputs and training samples. We first conduct the experiments in supervised setting on four standard English RE datasets, results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets and competitive results on the fourth in the supervised setting. Furthermore, our method outperforms baselines by a large margin across all datasets in the more demanding unsupervised setting.

AMR-RE: Abstract Meaning Representations for Retrieval-Based In-Context Learning in Relation Extraction

Annotator perspectives are crucial in subjective NLP tasks, yet most models rely on aggregated labels, overlooking demographic variation. We introduce the Annotator-Wise Attention Network (AWAN), which updates token representations into feature-specific representations by attending to demographic features, allowing models to learn annotation-specific patterns. Using the EXIST sexism detection dataset, we show that the AWAN-Full approach, which leverages all possible demographic feature combinations, improves sexism detection performance when considering annotator labels. Additionally, AWAN outperforms a widely used multi-task model in predicting annotator-specific labels, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing annotation diversity for perspective-aware classification.

Demographic Features for Annotation-Aware Classification

Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily trained on high-resource natural languages, limiting their effectiveness in low-resource settings and in tasks requiring deep logical reasoning. This research investigates the use of a custom logical language as a controlled environment for evaluating LLMs' pattern recognition and problem-solving abilities. We assess their logical accuracy and generalization capabilities by translating a dataset of logical propositions from Lean into this newly created language, which is then used to fine-tune an LLM (e.g GPT-4o). Our experiments analyze the impact of the size of the dataset and the translation methodology on the performance of the model. Our results indicate that preserving logical relationships in translation process significantly boost precision, with accuracy plateauing beyond roughly 20,000 training samples. These insights provide valuable guidelines for optimizing LLM training in formal reasoning tasks and improving performance in various low-resource language applications.

Propositional Logic as a Benchmark for Large Language Model Reasoning

Code Language Models have been trained to generate accurate solutions, typically with no regard for runtime. On the other hand, previous works that explored execution optimisation have observed corresponding drops in functional correctness. To that end, we introduce Code-Optimise, a framework that incorporates both correctness (passed, failed) and runtime (quick, slow) as learning signals via self-generated preference data. Our framework is both lightweight and robust as it dynamically selects solutions to reduce overfitting while avoiding a reliance on larger models for learning signals. Code-Optimise achieves significant improvements in pass@k while decreasing the competitive baseline runtimes by an additional 6% for in-domain data and up to 3% for out-of-domain data. As a by-product, the average length of the generated solutions is reduced by up to 48% on MBPP and 23% on HumanEval, resulting in faster and cheaper inference. The generated data and codebase is open-sourced at https://github.com/huawei-noah/HEBO/tree/Code_Optimise.

Code-Optimise: Self-Generated Preference Data for Correctness and Efficiency

With the success of integrating large language models into the development of conversational systems, many studies have shown the effectiveness of retrieving and augmenting external knowledge for informative responses. While many existing studies agree on the necessity of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), further investigation into the necessity and value of applying RAG to every turn of the conversation is needed. In this study, we propose to investigate the need for each turn of system response to be augmented with external knowledge. In particular, by leveraging human judgements on the binary choice of adaptive augmentation, we develop RAGate, a gating model, which models conversation context and relevant inputs to predict if a conversational system requires RAG for improved responses. We conduct extensive experiments on devising and applying RAGate to conversational models, joined with well-rounded analyses of various conversational scenarios. Our experimental results and analysis indicate the effective application of RAGate in RAG-based conversational systems in identifying if system responses require RAG to generate high-quality responses with high confidence. This study also identifies and shows the correlation between the generation's confidence level and the relevance of the augmented knowledge. We have also released the implementation code and resources in https://github.com/wangxieric/RAGate.

Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Conversational Systems

Numerous adversarial defense methods have been proposed to strengthen the robustness of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models against adversarial attacks. However, many of these methods rely on predetermined linguistic knowledge and assume that attackers' synonym candidates are known, which is often unrealistic. In this work, we investigate adversarial training in the embedding space and introduce a Fast Adversarial Training (FAT) method to improve the model robustness without requiring synonym awareness. FAT leverages single-step perturbation generation and effective perturbation initialization based on two key insights: (1) adversarial perturbations generated by single-step and multi-step gradient ascent are similar, and (2) perturbations generated on the same training sample across successive epochs exhibit resemblance. By employing single-step gradient ascent and leveraging historical perturbation information, FAT not only expedites the training process but also efficiently initializes perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAT significantly enhances the robustness of popular NLP models under scenarios where synonyms are unknown, outperforming other defense baselines under various character-level and word-level attacks.

Synonym-unaware Fast Adversarial Training against Textual Adversarial Attacks

Current multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems rely on fully supervised data (i.e sentences with their translations and accompanying images), which is costly to collect and prevents the extension of MMT to language pairs with no such data. We propose a method to bypass the need for fully supervised data to train MMT systems, using multimodal English data only. Our method ( ZeroMMT) consists in adapting a strong text-only machine translation (MT) model by training it jointly on two objectives: visually conditioned masked language modelling and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the original MT and new MMT outputs. We evaluate on standard MMT benchmarks and on CoMMuTE, a contrastive test set designed to evaluate how well models use images to disambiguate translations. ZeroMMT obtains disambiguation results close to state-of-the-art MMT models trained on fully supervised examples. To prove that ZeroMMT generalizes to languages with no fully supervised training data, we extend CoMMuTE to three new languages: Arabic, Russian and Chinese. We also show that we can control the trade-off between disambiguation capabilities and translation fidelity at inference time using classifier-free guidance and without any additional data. Our code, data and trained models are publicly accessible.

Towards Zero-Shot Multimodal Machine Translation

Complex table question answering (TQA) aims to answer questions that require complex reasoning, such as multi-step or multi-category reasoning, over data represented in tabular form. Previous approaches demonstrate notable performance by leveraging either closed-source large language models (LLMs) or fine-tuned open-weight LLMs. However, fine-tuning LLMs requires high-quality training data, which is costly to obtain. The use of closed-source LLMs poses accessibility challenges and leads to reproducibility issues. In this paper, we propose Multi Agent Collaboration with Tool use (MACT), a framework that requires neither fine-tuning nor closed-source models. In MACT, a planning agent and a coding agent that also make use of tools collaborate for TQA. MACT outperforms previous SoTA systems on three out of four benchmarks and performs comparably to the larger and more expensive closed-source model GPT-4 on two benchmarks, even when using only open-weight models without any fine-tuning. Our extensive analyses prove the effectiveness of MACT’s multi-agent collaboration in TQA. We release our code publicly.

Efficient Multi-Agent Collaboration with Tool Use for Online Planning in Complex Table Question Answering

This paper presents ViSP, a high-quality Vietnamese dataset for sentence paraphrasing, consisting of 1.2M original–paraphrase pairs collected from various domains. The dataset was constructed using a hybrid approach that combines automatic paraphrase generation with manual evaluation to ensure high quality. We conducted experiments using methods such as back-translation, EDA, and baseline models like BART and T5, as well as large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5, Aya, Qwen-2.5, and Meta-Llama-3.1 variants. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale study on Vietnamese paraphrasing. We hope that our dataset and findings will serve as a valuable foundation for future research and applications in Vietnamese paraphrase tasks. The dataset is available for research purposes at <https://github.com/ngwgsang/ViSP>.

A Large-Scale Benchmark for Vietnamese Sentence Paraphrases

Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance across various text generation tasks, but remain under-explored in the patent domain, which offers highly structured and precise language. This paper constructs a dataset to investigate the performance of current LLMs in patent claim generation. Our results demonstrate that generating claims based on patent descriptions outperforms previous research relying on abstracts. Interestingly, current patent-specific LLMs perform much worse than state-of-the-art general LLMs, highlighting the necessity for future research on in-domain LLMs. We also find that LLMs can produce high-quality first independent claims, but their performances markedly decrease for subsequent dependent claims. Moreover, fine-tuning can enhance the completeness of inventions' features, conceptual clarity, and feature linkage. Among the tested LLMs, GPT-4 demonstrates the best performance in comprehensive human evaluations by patent experts, with better feature coverage, conceptual clarity, and technical coherence. Despite these capabilities, comprehensive revision and modification are still necessary to pass rigorous patent scrutiny and ensure legal robustness.

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AMR-RE: Abstract Meaning Representations for Retrieval-Based In-Context Learning in Relation Extraction

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