Singapore

Deep research agents have attracted growing attention for their potential to orchestrate multi-stage research workflows, spanning literature synthesis, methodological design, and empirical verification. Despite these strides, evaluating their research capability faithfully is rather challenging due to the difficulty of collecting frontier research questions that genuinely capture researchers’ attention and intellectual curiosity. To address this gap, we introduce \textit{\textbf{DeepResearch Arena}}, a benchmark grounded in academic seminars that capture rich expert discourse and interaction, better reflecting real-world research environments and reducing the risk of data leakage. To automatically construct DeepResearch Arena, we propose a Multi-Agent Hierarchical Task Generation (MAHTG) system that extracts research-worthy inspirations from seminar transcripts. The MAHTG system further translates research-worthy inspirations into high-quality research tasks, ensuring the traceability of research task formulation while filtering noise. With the MAHTG system, we curate DeepResearch Arena with over 10,000 high-quality research tasks from over 200 academic seminars, spanning 12 disciplines, such as literature, history, and science. Our extensive evaluation shows that DeepResearch Arena presents substantial challenges for current state-of-the-art agents, with clear performance gaps observed across different models.

AAAI 2026

Deep Research Arena: The First Exam of LLMs’ Research Abilities via Seminar-Grounded Tasks

nlp: (large) language models

and evaluation of nlp models

nlp: interpretability

nlp: applications

analysis

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

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Ensemble Temporal Prediction Model-as-a-Service (ETP-MaaS) has become crucial in areas such as financial modeling, weather forecasting, and cloud monitoring, managing a dynamic set of base models and workers. Real-world systems face a two-fold challenge of dynamic collaboration and heterogeneity that current methods overlook. At the model level, data volatility dictates that optimal performance requires identifying and weighting constantly shifting subgroups of base models, not just individual ones. At the system level, these model groups must be efficiently mapped to a pool of heterogeneous and dynamically available workers. Existing solutions fail to co-optimally address these intertwined tasks, treating models as independent entities and employing simplistic allocation rules, resulting in poor accuracy and resource inefficiency. To this end, we introduce WIET, an efficient ETP-MaaS system that innovates in weight distribution and worker allocation to tackle these dynamics. We model evolving group behaviors among base models and propose a novel group temporal locality-enhanced multi-label classification method for highly adaptive weighting. Additionally, we develop an efficient, multi-dimensional worker allocation method powered by hybrid heuristic optimization, effectively reducing bottlenecks and resource waste. Extensive experiments have shown that WIET consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of model accuracy, latency, and resource usage across various workloads and prediction tasks.

WIET: Harmonizing Group-aware Model Weighting and Worker Allocation for Ensemble Temporal Prediction MaaS

Large language models (LLMs) utilize key-value (KV) cache to store historical information during sequence processing. The size of KV cache grows linearly as the length of the sequence extends, which seriously affects memory usage and decoding efficiency. Current methods for KV cache eviction typically utilize the last window from the pre-filling phase as queries to compute the KV importance scores for eviction. Although this scheme is simple to implement, it tends to overly focus on local information, potentially leading to the neglect or omission of crucial global information. To mitigate this issue, we propose **Judge Q**, a novel training method which incorporates a soft token list. This method only tunes the model’s embedding layer at a low training cost. By concatenating the soft token list at the end of the input sequence, we train these tokens' attention map to the original input sequence to align with that of the actual decoded tokens. In this way, the queries corresponding to the soft tokens can effectively capture global information and better evaluate the importance of the keys and values within the KV cache, thus maintaining decoding quality when KV cache is evicted. Under the same eviction budget, our method exhibits less performance degradation compared to existing eviction approaches. We validate our approach through experiments conducted on models such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, using benchmarks including LongBench, RULER, and Needle-in-a-Haystack. Results indicate an improvement of approximately 1 point on the LongBench and over 3 points on RULER. This proposed methodology can be seamlessly integrated into existing open-source models with minimal training overhead, thereby enhancing performance in KV cache eviction scenarios.

Judge Q: Trainable Queries for Optimized Information Retention in KV Cache Eviction

Fetal ultrasound screening is a uniquely complex diagnostic task involving the simultaneous assessment of multiple fetal organs—each with its own anatomical and clinical context—within a single examination. Automating report generation for such cases poses a significant challenge: unlike existing methods that focus on single-organ radiology tasks (e.g., chest X-rays), fetal ultrasound requires reasoning over a structured, \textbf{multiple-to-multiple} setting, i.e., multi-organ images corresponding to a multi-section report. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{{FetusR}}, the first large-scale dataset for multi-organ fetal ultrasound reporting, containing 15,594 real-world cases with rich organ-wise annotations. To address the intrinsic image-report alignment, we propose \textbf{\emph{Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (ORM-RAG)}} inspired by the Mixture-of-Experts paradigm. Our method decomposes the complex alignment problem into multiple one-to-one sub-retrieval tasks. Specifically, ORM-RAG integrates (1) an organ-aware mixture-of-retrieval module that partitions the retrieval space into organ-specific corpora for independent retrieval, and (2) a dynamic routing mechanism that selectively aggregates high-confidence organ-specific reports while filtering uncertain ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both textual similarity and clinical accuracy metrics. Our work opens a new direction for long-form, structured report generation in real-world, multi-organ medical imaging scenarios. All codes will be available.

Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Fetal Ultrasound Reporting

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, their inherent tendency toward verbatim memorization of training data introduces critical risks like copyright infringement, insecurity emission, and deprecated API utilization, etc. A straightforward yet promising defense is unlearning, i.e., erasing or down-weighting the offending snippets through post-training. However, we find its application to source code often tends to spill over, damaging the basic knowledge of programming languages learned by the LLM and degrading the overall capability. To ease this challenge, we propose PROD for precise source code unlearning. PROD surgically zeroes out the prediction probability of the prohibited tokens, and renormalizes the remaining distribution so that the generated code stays correct. By excising only the targeted snippets, PROD achieves precise forgetting without much degradation of the LLM's overall capability. To facilitate in-depth evaluation against PROD, we establish an unlearning benchmark consisting of three downstream tasks (i.e., unlearning of copyrighted code, insecure code, and deprecated APIs), and introduce Pareto Dominance Ratio (PDR) metric, which indicates both the forget quality and the LLM utility. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that PROD achieves superior overall performance between forget quality and model utility compared to existing unlearning approaches across three downstream tasks, while consistently exhibiting improvements when applied to LLMs of varying series. PROD also exhibits superior robustness against adversarial attacks without generating or exposing the data to be forgotten. These results underscore that our approach not only successfully extends the application boundary of unlearning techniques to source code, but also holds significant implications for advancing reliable code generation.

Large Language Model Unlearning for Source Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but incur high communication overhead and privacy risks in cloud deployments, while facing compute and memory constraints when confined to edge devices.Cloud–edge inference has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving privacy in LLM services by retaining sensitive computations on local devices.However, existing cloud–edge inference approaches apply uniform privacy protection without considering input sensitivity, resulting in unnecessary perturbation and degraded utility even for non-sensitive tokens. To address this limitation, we propose Privacy-aware Routing for Inference with Semantic Modulation (PRISM), a context-aware framework that dynamically balances privacy and inference quality. PRISM executes in four stages: (1) the edge device profiles entity-level sensitivity; (2) a soft gating module, also on the edge, selects an execution mode -cloud, edge, or collaboration; (3) for collaborative paths, the edge applies adaptive two-layer local differential privacy based on entity risks; and (4) the cloud LLM generates a semantic sketch from the perturbed prompt, which is then refined by the edge-side small language model (SLM) using local context.Our results show that PRISM consistently achieves superior privacy-utility trade-offs in various scenarios, reducing energy consumption and latency to 40–50\% of baseline methods such as Uniform and Selective LDP, while maintaining high output quality under strong privacy constraints. These findings are validated through comprehensive evaluations involving realistic prompts, actual energy measurements, and heterogeneous cloud–edge model deployments.

PRISM: Privacy-Aware Routing for Adaptive Cloud–Edge LLM Inference via Semantic Sketch Collaboration

Graph learning faces major challenges under noisy and sparse supervision, where corrupted labels mislead representation learning and impair generalization. Prior work proposes robust training strategies such as correction, reweighting, and denoising to reduce the influence of noisy labels. However, most methods still optimize directly on training nodes using their possibly corrupted labels as supervision signals. In this work, we propose a prototype-guided framework that replaces direct label supervision over training nodes with semantic supervision derived from class-level prototypes. Each prototype is formed by aggregating representations of nodes sharing the same observed label and serves as a semantic anchor for guiding the classifier. To address the inherent supervision sparsity introduced by limited prototype instances, we introduce a dual-branch mixup strategy that integrates prototypes with high-confidence nodes through intra- and inter-class interpolation, which enhances supervision coverage and improves representation continuity. We further constrain the spatial variance of these samples to promote intra-class compactness. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the constructed prototypes remain aligned with true class semantics under bounded noise rates. Experiments on node classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our approach under label noise and limited supervision.

Prototype-Guided Supervision for Graph Learning with Noisy and Sparse Labels

Federated Edge Learning (FEL) has emerged as a promising approach for enabling edge devices to collaboratively train machine learning models while preserving data privacy. Despite its advantages, practical FEL deployment faces significant challenges related to device constraints and device-server interactions, necessitating heterogeneous, user-adaptive model training with limited and uncertain communication. While knowledge cache-driven federated learning offers a promising FEL solution for demanding edge environments, its logits-based interaction design provides poor richness of exchanged information for on-device model optimization. To tackle this issue, we introduce DistilCacheFL, a novel personalized FEL architecture that enhances the exchange of optimization insights while delivering state-of-the-art performance with efficient communication. DistilCacheFL incorporates the benefits of both dataset distillation and knowledge cache-driven federated learning by storing and organizing distilled data as knowledge in the server-side knowledge cache, allowing devices to periodically download and utilize personalized knowledge for local model optimization. Moreover, a device-centric cache sampling strategy is introduced to tailor transferred knowledge for individual devices within controlled communication bandwidth. Extensive experiments on five datasets covering image recognition, audio understanding, and mobile sensor data mining tasks demonstrate that (1) DistilCacheFL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods regardless of model structures, data distributions, and modalities. (2) DistilCacheFL can train splendid personalized on-device models with at least 
28.6 improvement in communication efficiency.

Re-architecting Personalized Federated Learning for Demanding Edge Environments

Conformal prediction constructs a set of labels instead of a single point prediction, while providing a probabilistic coverage guarantee. Beyond the coverage guarantee, adaptiveness to example difficulty is an important property. It means that the method should produce larger prediction sets for more difficult examples, and smaller ones for easier examples. Existing evaluation methods for adaptiveness typically analyze coverage rate violation or average set size across bins of examples grouped by difficulty. However, these approaches often suffer from imbalanced binning, which can lead to inaccurate estimates of coverage or set size. To address this issue, we propose a binning method that leverages input transformations to sort examples by difficulty, followed by uniform-mass binning. Building on this binning, we introduce two metrics to better evaluate adaptiveness. These metrics provide more reliable estimates of coverage rate violation and average set size due to balanced binning, leading to more accurate adaptivity assessment. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed metric correlates more strongly with the desired adaptiveness property compared to existing ones. Furthermore, motivated by our findings, we propose a new adaptive prediction set algorithm that groups examples by estimated difficulty and applies group-conditional conformal prediction. This allows us to determine appropriate thresholds for each group. Experimental results on both (a) an Image Classification (ImageNet) (b) a medical task (visual acuity prediction) show that our method outperforms existing approaches according to the new metrics.

Quantifying and Improving Adaptivity in Conformal Prediction Through Input Transformations

Tensor network structure search (TN-SS) aims to automatically discover optimal network topologies and rank configurations for efficient tensor decomposition in high-dimensional data representation. Despite recent advances, existing TN-SS methods face significant limitations in computational tractability, structure adaptivity, and optimization robustness across diverse tensor characteristics. Current approaches struggle with three fundamental challenges: single-scale optimization that misses multi-scale structures, discrete search spaces that prevent smooth structure evolution, and separation of structure and parameter optimization that creates computational inefficiency. We propose RGTN (\textbf{R}enormalization \textbf{G}roup guided \textbf{T}ensor \textbf{N}etwork search), a novel physics-inspired framework that fundamentally transforms tensor network structure search through multi-scale renormalization group flows. Unlike existing methods that search through discrete structure spaces at fixed scales, RGTN implements a dynamic scale-transformation strategy where network structures evolve continuously across resolution levels. The key innovation lies in introducing learnable edge gates that enable topology modification during optimization, combined with intelligent structure proposals based on physical quantities—node tension measuring local stress and edge information flow quantifying connectivity importance. By starting optimization at coarse scales with exponentially reduced complexity and progressively refining toward finer scales, RGTN discovers more compact structures while naturally escaping local minima through scale-induced perturbations. Our code is available in the supplementary materials for reproducibility.

Renormalization Group Guided Tensor Network Structure Search

Capsule Network (CapsNet) has demonstrated significant potential in visual recognition by capturing spatial relationships and part-whole hierarchies for learning equivariant feature representations. However, existing CapsNet and variants often rely on a single high-level feature map, overlooking the rich complementary information provided by multi-scale features. Furthermore, conventional feature fusion strategies, such as addition and concatenation, struggle to reconcile multi-scale feature discrepancies, leading to suboptimal classification performance. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-Scale Patchify Capsule Network (MSPCaps), a novel architecture that integrates multi-scale feature learning and efficient capsule routing. Specifically, MSPCaps consists of three key components: a Multi-Scale ResNet Backbone (MSRB), a Patchify Capsule Layer (PatchifyCaps), and a Cross-Agreement Routing (CAR) block. First, the MSRB extracts diverse multi-scale feature representations from input images, preserving both fine-grained details and global contextual information. Second, the PatchifyCaps partitions these multi-scale features into primary capsules using a uniform patch size, equipping the model with the ability to learn from diverse receptive fields. Finally, the CAR block adaptively routes the multi-scale capsules by identifying cross-scale prediction pairs with maximum agreement. Unlike the simple concatenation of multiple self-routing blocks, CAR ensures that only the most coherent capsules (best part-to-whole pairs) contribute to the final voting. Our proposed MSPCaps achieves remarkable scalability and superior robustness, consistently surpassing multiple baseline methods in terms of classification accuracy, with configurations ranging from a highly efficient Tiny model (344.3K parameters) to a powerful Large model (10.9M parameters), highlighting its potential in advancing feature representation learning.

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