Morocco

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in Computer Science (CS) classrooms to automate code generation, feedback, and assessment. However, their susceptibility to adversarial or ill-intentioned prompts threatens student learning and academic integrity. To cope with this important issue, we evaluate existing off-the-shelf LLMs in handling unsafe and irrelevant prompts within the domain of CS education. We identify important shortcomings in existing LLM guardrails which motivates us to propose CodeGuard, a comprehensive guardrail framework for educational AI systems. CodeGuard includes (i) a first-of-its-kind taxonomy for classifying prompts; (ii) the CodeGuard dataset, a collection of 8,000 prompts spanning the taxonomy; and (iii) PromptShield, a lightweight sentence-encoder model fine-tuned to detect unsafe prompts in real time. Experiments show that PromptShield achieves 0.93 F1 score, surpassing existing guardrail methods. Additionally, further experimentation reveals that CodeGuard reduces potentially harmful or policy-violating code completions by 30-65% without degrading performance on legitimate educational tasks. The code, datasets, and evaluation scripts are made freely available to the community.

EACL 2026

CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education

guardrails

large language models

education

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

technical paper

The performance of large language models (LLMs) tends to degrade for extremely low-resource languages, primarily due to the lack of labeled training data. Despite growing interest, the availability of high-quality natural language processing (NLP) datasets for these languages remains limited. This paper addresses such gap by focusing on Ladin, an endangered Romance language, specifically the Val Badia variant. Leveraging a small set of parallel LadinвЂ“Italian sentence pairs, we create synthetic datasets for sentiment analysis and question answering by translating monolingual Italian data. To ensure linguistic quality, we apply rigorous filtering and back-translation procedures in our method. We further demonstrate that incorporating these synthetic datasets into machine translation training leads to substantial improvements over existing ItalianвЂ“Ladin translation baselines. Our contributions include sentiment analysis and question answering datasets for Ladin, establishing foundational resources that support broader NLP research and downstream applications for underrepresented languages.

Towards the First NLP Benchmark for Ladin - an Extremely Low-Resource Language

Activation steering or editing hidden states to control language-model behavior can be framed as a causal mediation problem: inputs induce internal activations, a subset of which act as mediators transmitting targeted behaviors to outputs. We formalize a structural graph over transformer layers and derive front-door—style identification conditions that justify steering through mediating subspaces while preserving non-mediating features, thereby reducing confounding and off-target effects. Within this mediation-first view, we present CAS-BiPO, a sparse mediation steering approach that learns targeted behavioral interventions via regularized training. Empirically, our method achieves 97-100% of dense baseline effectiveness across four behavioral control tasks while using only 10-30% of activation dimensions. Learned masks concentrate 94.3% of steering effects in 26.7% of dimensions, with neurons exhibiting 2.2 x higher activation changes, validating the sparse mediation hypothesis. Our causal framework provides theoretical grounding while CAS-BiPO demonstrates that end-to-end learning of interpretable, reliable interventions is both feasible and advantageous.

Causal Activation Steering via Sparse Mediation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences by formulating preference learning as a supervised classification problem over pairwise human-labeled outputs, thereby enabling stable and efficient training. We show that DPO inherits bias from confounders (e.g., topic, style, user objectives) that shape data generation and carry through to training, hindering recovery of true human preferences. We address this from a causal perspective, proposing Causal Direct Preference Optimization (CDPO), a general framework that incorporates causal inference principles to mitigate the influence of confounders and sharpen the signal of genuine human preferences. Our approach preserves the tractability of direct optimization while enhancing robustness to spurious correlations and annotation biases. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets show that CDPO surpasses DPO-based baselines by achieving unbiased fine-tuning through causal reasoning, confirming the effectiveness of confounder-aware preference optimization.

Causal Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment

Prompts are the interface for eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Understanding their structure and components is critical for analyzing LLM behavior and optimizing performance. However, the field lacks a comprehensive framework for systematic prompt analysis and understanding. We introduce PromptPrism, a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. By applying linguistic concepts to prompt analysis, PromptPrism bridges traditional language understanding and modern LLM research, offering insights that purely empirical approaches might miss. We show the practical utility of PromptPrism by applying it to three applications: (1) a taxonomy-guided prompt refinement approach that automatically improves prompt quality and enhances model performance across a range of tasks; (2) a multi-dimensional dataset profiling method that extracts and aggregates structural, semantic, and syntactic characteristics from prompt datasets, enabling comprehensive analysis of prompt distributions and patterns; (3) a controlled experimental framework for prompt sensitivity analysis by quantifying the impact of semantic reordering and delimiter modifications on LLM performance. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our taxonomy across these applications, demonstrating that PromptPrism provides a foundation for refining, profiling, and analyzing prompts.

PromptPrism: A Linguistically-Inspired Taxonomy for Prompts

The strong capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them highly effective for zero-shot re-ranking task. Attention-based re-ranking methods, which derive relevance scores directly from attention weights, offer an efficient and interpretable alternative to generation-based re-ranking methods. However, they still face two major limitations. First, attention signals are highly concentrated a small subset of tokens within a few documents, making others indistinguishable. Second, attention often overemphasizes phrases lexically similar to the query, yielding biased rankings that irrelevant documents with mere lexical resemblance are regarded as relevant. In this paper, we propose \textbf{ReAttn}, a post-hoc re-weighting strategy for attention-based re-ranking methods. It first compute the cross-document IDF weighting to down-weight attention on query-overlapping tokens that frequently appear across the candidate documents, reducing lexical bias and emphasizing distinctive terms. It then employs entropy-based regularization to mitigate over-concentrated attention, encouraging a more balanced distribution across informative tokens. Both adjustments operate directly on existing attention weights without additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

ReAttn: Improving Attention-based Re-ranking via Attention Re-weighting

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains such as education, mental health and customer support, where stable and consistent personas are critical for reliability. Yet, existing studies focus on narrative or role-playing tasks and overlook how adversarial conversational history alone can reshape induced personas. Black-box persona manipulation remains unexplored, raising concerns for robustness in realistic interactions. In response, we introduce the task of persona editing, which adversarially steers LLM traits through user-side inputs under a black-box, inference-only setting. To this end, we propose PHISH (Persona Hijacking via Implicit Steering in History), the first framework to expose a new vulnerability in LLM safety that embeds semantically loaded cues into user queries to gradually induce reverse personas. We also define a metric to quantify attack success. Across 3 benchmarks and 8 LLMs, PHISH predictably shifts personas, triggers collateral changes in correlated traits, and exhibits stronger effects in multi-turn settings. In high-risk domains mental health, tutoring, and customer support, PHISH reliably manipulates personas, validated by both human and LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Importantly, PHISH causes only a small reduction in reasoning benchmark performance, leaving overall utility largely intact while still enabling significant persona manipulation. While current guardrails offer partial protection, they remain brittle under sustained attack. Our findings expose new vulnerabilities in personas and highlight the need for context-resilient persona in LLMs. Our codebase and dataset is available at: https://github.com/Jivnesh/PHISH

Persona Jailbreaking in Large Language Models

The paradigm of augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools is rapidly converging on the Model-Context Protocol (MCP), a federated architecture of tool "servers'' that mirrors the modern internet. Existing benchmarks, however, remain misaligned with this architecture, typically evaluating agents with APIs in an unstructured, non-hierarchical manner. They often test components like retrieval and reasoning in isolation or sidestep the critical real-world challenge of functional overlap among tools. This leads to an incomplete and overly optimistic assessment of agent capabilities. To address these gaps, we introduceMSC-Bench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating end-to-end, multi-hop tool use within an explicit, hierarchical MCP ecosystem. A core contribution is our methodology for constructing ground truth by identifying "equal function sets''---groups of functionally equivalent tools. This approach enables the use of objective and reproducible metrics (e.g., F1-score) and mitigates the reliance on fallible LLM-as-a-judge evaluations. MSC-Bench is structured as a five-level curriculum designed to systematically test a full spectrum of agent capabilities, from single-tool execution to complex cross-server orchestration and robustness to out-of-scope requests. Our experiments reveal that rigid hierarchies can hinder performance without co-designed strategies and that even state-of-the-art agents exhibit systemic weaknesses in robustness. MSC-Bench provides a much-needed diagnostic framework to expose these limitations and guide the development of more capable and efficient tool-using systems.

ETOM: A Five-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Tool Orchestration within the MCP Ecosystem

Information Retrieval (IR) methods aim to identify documents relevant to a query, which have been widely applied in various natural language tasks. However, existing approaches typically consider only the textual content within documents, overlooking the fact that documents can contain multiple modalities, including images and tables. Also, they often segment each long document into multiple discrete passages for embedding, which prevents them from capturing the overall document context and interactions between paragraphs. To address these two challenges, we propose a method that holistically embeds documents interleaved with multiple modalities by leveraging the capability of recent vision-language models that enable the processing and integration of text, images, and tables into a unified format and representation. Moreover, to mitigate the information loss from segmenting documents into passages, instead of representing and retrieving passages individually, we further merge the representations of segmented passages into one single document representation, while we additionally introduce a reranking strategy to decouple and identify the relevant passage within the document if necessary. Then, through extensive experiments on diverse IR scenarios considering both the textual and multimodal queries, we show that our approach substantially outperforms relevant baselines, thanks to the consideration of the multimodal information within documents.

Unified Multimodal Interleaved Document Representation for Retrieval

Structured output from large language models (LLMs) has enhanced efficiency in processing generated information and is increasingly adopted in industrial applications. Prior studies have investigated the impact of structured output on LLMs' generation quality, often presenting one-way findings. Some suggest that structured format enhances completeness and factual accuracy, while others argue that it restricts the reasoning capacity of LLMs and leads to reductions in standard evaluation metrics. Potential limitations of these assessments include restricted testing scenarios, weakly controlled comparative settings, and reliance on coarse metrics. In this work, we present a refined analysis using causal inference. Based on one assumed and two guaranteed constraints, we derive five potential causal structures characterizing the influence of structured output on LLMs' generation: (1) collider without m-bias, (2) collider with m-bias, (3) single cause from instruction, (4) single cause from output format, and (5) independence. Across seven public and one developed reasoning tasks, we find that coarse metrics report positive, negative, or neutral effects of structured output on GPT-4o's generation. However, causal inference reveals no causal impact in 43 out of 48 scenarios. In the remaining 5, 3 involve multifaceted causal structures influenced by concrete instructions. Further experiments show that OpenAI-o3 are more resilient to output formats than general-purpose GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, highlighting an unaware advantage of reasoning models.

Quantifying the Impact of Structured Output Format on Large Language Models through Causal Inference

Zero-shot video captioning requires that a model generate high-quality captions without human-annotated video-text pairs for training. State-of-the-art approaches to the problem leverage CLIP to extract video-informed text prompts to guide language models in generating captions. However, by using representations at a single granularity (e.g., noun phrases or full sentences), these methods tend to focus on one key aspect of the scene and build a caption that ignores the rest of the visual input. To address this issue, and generate more accurate and complete captions, we propose a novel progressive multi-granularity textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning. Our approach constructs three distinct memory banks, encompassing noun phrases, scene graphs of noun phrases, and entire sentences. Moreover, we introduce a category-aware retrieval mechanism that models the distribution of natural language surrounding the specific topics, to promote prompt diversity while ensuring visual relevance. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and cross-domain settings demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

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