China

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved great success in processing and understanding information from diverse modalities (e.g., text, audio, and visual signals). Despite their growing popularity, there remains a lack of comprehensive evaluation measuring the audio-visual capabilities of these models, especially in diverse scenarios (e.g., distribution shifts and adversarial attacks). In this paper, we present a multifaceted evaluation of the audio-visual capability of MLLMs, focusing on four key dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness. Through extensive experiments, we find that MLLMs exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities, enabling them to achieve great performance with limited data. However, their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. Additionally, while MLLMs are susceptible to adversarial samples, they demonstrate greater robustness compared to traditional models. The experimental results and our observations provide new insights into the audio-visual capabilities of MLLMs, highlighting areas for improvement and offering guidance for future research.

EMNLP 2025

Multifaceted Evaluation of Audio-Visual Capability for MLLMs: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Generalizability and Robustness

multi-modal large language models

audio-visual

evaluation

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!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

This paper investigates compositionality in chemical language models (LLMs) by utilizing several chemical datasets to develop a benchmark that assesses these models' capabilities. We modify the dataset to generate compositional questions that reflect intricate chemical structures and reactions, thereby testing the models' understanding of chemical language. Our approach focuses on identifying and analyzing compositional patterns within chemical data, allowing us to evaluate how well existing LLMs can handle complex queries. We conduct extensive experiments on several state-of-the-art chemical LLMs, revealing their strengths and weaknesses in compositional reasoning. By creating and sharing this benchmark, we aim to enhance the development of more capable chemical LLMs and provide a resource for future research on compositionality in chemical understanding. This work contributes to the advancement of efficient AI systems for chemical analysis and synthesis, paving the way for more sophisticated applications in the field.

Two Steps from Hell: Compositionality on Chemical LMs

In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, pure reinforcement learning fine-tuning methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence; while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods, although efficient in training, have limited performance ceiling and less solid theoretical foundation compared to reinforcement learning. To address efficiency-capability trade-off, we propose the Guess-Think-Answer (GTA) framework that combines the efficiency of SFT with the capability gains of RL in a unified training paradigm. GTA works by having the model first produce a provisional guess (optimized via cross-entropy loss), then reflect on this guess before generating the final answer, with RL rewards shaping both the final output and the format of the entire GTA structure. This hybrid approach achieves both faster convergence than pure RL and higher performance ceiling than pure SFT. To mitigate gradient conflicts between the two training signals, we employ loss masking and gradient constraints. Empirical results on three text classification benchmarks demonstrate that GTA substantially accelerates convergence while outperforming both standalone SFT and RL baselines.

GTA: Supervised-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Text Classification with Large Language Models

Most work on Knowledge Graph (KG) verbalisation is monolingual leaving open the question of how to scale KG-to-Text generation to languages with varying amounts of resources. In this work, we explore KG-to-Text generation on nine languages including five high-resource (HR) languages (English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian) and four low-resource (LR) languages (Breton, Irish, Maltese, Welsh). We first construct silver multilingual training data for all nine languages and new gold out-of-domain test data for the five HR languages. Using this data and already available in-domain test sets for 7 of our 9 languages, we then compare three strategies: (1) NLG+MT—a state-of-the-art KG-to-English model followed by Machine Translation (MT) into the target language; (2) FTMT—multilingual MT models fine-tuned end-to-end on the silver data; and (3) FewShot—few-shot LLM prompting comparing 4 LLMs. We explore different prompting strategies and show that our best prompting strategy performs the best on all 9 languages, discussing the relative performance of the three approaches on Low vs High Resource languages and on in- vs out-of-domain data. The models, the test set and the silver training data will be made available upon acceptance.

Multilingual Verbalisation of Knowledge Graphs

A core barrier preventing recommender systems from reaching their full potential lies in the inherent limitations of user-item interaction data: (1) Sparse user-item interactions, making it difficult to learn reliable user preferences; (2) Traditional contrastive learning methods often treat negative samples as equally hard or easy, ignoring the informative semantic difficulty during training. (3) Modern LLM-based recommender systems, on the other hand, discard all negative feedback, leading to unbalanced preference modeling. To address these issues, we propose LAGCL4Rec, a framework leveraging Large Language Models to Activate interactions in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation. Our approach operates through three stages: (i) Data-Level: augmenting sparse interactions with balanced positive and negative samples using LLM-enriched profiles; (ii) Rank-Level: assessing semantic difficulty of negative samples through LLM-based grouping for fine-grained contrastive learning; and (iii) Rerank-Level: reasoning over augmented historical interactions for personalized recommendations. Theoretical analysis proves that LAGCL4Rec achieves effective information utilization with minimal computational overhead. Experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LAGCL4Rec-25C1.

LAGCL4Rec: When LLMs Activate Interactions Potential in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models by decomposing weight updates into low-rank matrices, significantly reducing storage and computational overhead. While effective, standard LoRA lacks mechanisms for uncertainty quantification, leading to overconfident and poorly calibrated models. Bayesian variants of LoRA address this limitation, but at the cost of a significantly increased number of trainable parameters, partially offsetting the original efficiency gains. Additionally, these models are harder to train and may suffer from unstable convergence. In this work, we propose a novel parameter-efficient Bayesian LoRA, demonstrating that effective uncertainty quantification can be achieved in very low-dimensional parameter spaces. The proposed method achieves strong performance with improved calibration and generalization while maintaining computational efficiency. Our empirical findings show that, with the appropriate projection of the weight space: (1) uncertainty can be effectively modeled in a low-dimensional space, and (2) weight covariances exhibit low ranks.

Minimal Ranks, Maximum Confidence: Parameter-efficient Uncertainty Quantification for LoRA

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. This paper examines three paradigms for building robotic systems: end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models that implicitly integrate perception and planning, and modular pipelines incorporating either vision-language models (VLMs) or multimodal large language models (LLMs). We evaluate these paradigms through two focused case studies: an instruction grounding task assessing fine-grained instruction understanding and cross-modal disambiguation, and an object manipulation task targeting skill transfer via VLA finetuning. Our experiments in zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal trade-offs in generalization and data efficiency. By exploring performance limits, we distill design implications for developing language-driven physical agents and outline emerging challenges and opportunities for FM-powered robotics in real-world conditions.

From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems

This paper establishes a formal information-theoretic framework for image captioning, conceptualizing captions as compressed linguistic representations that selectively encode semantic units in images. Our framework posits that good image captions should balance three key aspects: informationally sufficient, minimally redundant, and readily comprehensible by humans. By formulating these aspects as quantitative measures with adjustable weights, our framework provides a flexible foundation for analyzing and optimizing image captioning systems across diverse task requirements. To demonstrate its applicability, we introduce the Pyramid of Captions (PoCa) method, which generates enriched captions by integrating local and global visual information. We present both theoretical proof that PoCa improves caption quality under certain assumptions, and empirical validation of its effectiveness across various image captioning models and datasets.

What Makes for Good Image Captions?

Automatic language identification is frequently framed as a multi-class classification problem. However, when creating digital corpora, for less commonly written languages, it may be more appropriate to consider it a data mining problem. For these languages, one knows ahead of time that the vast majority of documents are of little interest. By minimizing resources spent on classifying such documents, we can create corpora for rare languages much faster and with better coverage than using established pipelines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the language mining perspective, we introduce a new pipeline and corpora for several French-based Creoles.

Identifying Rare Languages in Common Crawl Data is a Needles-in-a-Haystack Problem

Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires a vision-language model to reason over both visual and textual inputs to answer questions about images. In this work, we investigate whether incorporating explicit semantic information, in the form of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs, can enhance model performance—particularly in low-resource settings where training data is limited. We augment two vision-language models, LXMERT and BLIP-2, with sentence- and document-level AMRs and evaluate their performance under both full and reduced training data conditions. Our findings show that in well-resourced settings, models (in particular the smaller LXMERT) are negatively impacted by incorporating AMR without specialized training. However, in low-resource settings, AMR proves beneficial: LXMERT achieves up to a 13.1% relative gain using sentence-level AMRs. These results suggest that while addition of AMR can lower the performance in some settings, in a low-resource setting AMR can serve as a useful semantic prior, especially for lower-capacity models trained on limited data.

One More Modality: Does Abstract Meaning Representation Benefit Visual Question Answering?

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled substantial advances in solving mathematical problems. However, existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world complexity, which demand open-ended, interdisciplinary reasoning and integration of computational tools. To address this gap, we introduce **ModelingBench**, a novel benchmark featuring real-world-inspired, open-ended problems from math modeling competitions across diverse domains, ranging from urban traffic optimization to ecosystem resource planning. These tasks require translating natural language into formal mathematical formulations, applying appropriate tools, and producing structured, defensible reports. ModelingBench supports multiple valid solutions, capturing the ambiguity and creativity of practical modeling. To solve these challenges, we present **ModelingAgent**, a multi-agent framework that coordinates tool use, supports structured workflows, and enables iterative self-refinement to generate well-grounded, creative solutions. Empirical results show that ModelingAgent substantially outperforms strong baselines and often produces solutions indistinguishable from those of human experts. Together, our work provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and advancing real-world problem-solving in open-ended, interdisciplinary modeling challenges.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Two Steps from Hell: Compositionality on Chemical LMs

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