Morocco

We propose MaskLoRA, a plug-and-play masking mechanism that turns PEFT&#39;s low-rank subspace into a faithful, compute-aware token selector. Instead of relying on attention entropy or gradients, MaskLoRA scores tokens by the LoRA-induced representation shift and learns differentiable gates with an objective combining task loss, expected L 0 sparsity, prediction consistency (KL), and a subspace concentration term. We provide a bound showing the KL between full and masked predictions is controlled by the sum of dropped scores, implying top- k selection minimizes the bound. Across encoders on GLUE and SQuAD, MaskLoRA matches full-model accuracy while yielding 1.3 -- 2.6x end-to-end speedups; on long-context NarrativeQA/GovReport it attains 1.5 -- 3.6x with small but nonzero degradation (e.g., 0.4 at =70%, up to 1.2 at =50%, and up to 2.5 at 30%). Faithfulness improves over strong baselines (sufficiency 99.2%, necessity 59.3%, lower KL at =50%), and energy falls accordingly (GPU Joules-per-correct 3.28 1.34 at 30%). The method is KV-cache compatible, rank- and budget-controllable, and robust under OOD stress (HANS, adversarial sentiment, noisy SQuAD; at moderate budgets (50%) 0.9 abs. drop at matched budgets). Qualitative analyses show layer-wise retention concentrating at semantic bottlenecks and class-separated h i embeddings. MaskLoRA offers accuracy-matched speedups with interpretable rationales and practical deployment hooks.

EACL 2026

MaskLoRA: LowвЂ‘Rank SubspaceвЂ“Induced Token Masking for Efficient and Faithful Language Models

llm efficiency

parameter-efficient-training

nlp in resource-constrained settings

distillation

pruning

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

We propose MaskLoRA, a plug-and-play masking mechanism that turns PEFT's low-rank subspace into a faithful, compute-aware token selector. Instead of relying on attention entropy or gradients, MaskLoRA scores tokens by the LoRA-induced representation shift and learns differentiable gates with an objective combining task loss, expected L 0 sparsity, prediction consistency (KL), and a subspace concentration term. We provide a bound showing the KL between full and masked predictions is controlled by the sum of dropped scores, implying top- k selection minimizes the bound. Across encoders on GLUE and SQuAD, MaskLoRA matches full-model accuracy while yielding 1.3 -- 2.6x end-to-end speedups; on long-context NarrativeQA/GovReport it attains 1.5 -- 3.6x with small but nonzero degradation (e.g., 0.4 at =70%, up to 1.2 at =50%, and up to 2.5 at 30%). Faithfulness improves over strong baselines (sufficiency 99.2%, necessity 59.3%, lower KL at =50%), and energy falls accordingly (GPU Joules-per-correct 3.28 1.34 at 30%). The method is KV-cache compatible, rank- and budget-controllable, and robust under OOD stress (HANS, adversarial sentiment, noisy SQuAD; at moderate budgets (50%) 0.9 abs. drop at matched budgets). Qualitative analyses show layer-wise retention concentrating at semantic bottlenecks and class-separated h i embeddings. MaskLoRA offers accuracy-matched speedups with interpretable rationales and practical deployment hooks.

technical paper

#### *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. 

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into sparse, more interpretable features. While prior work suggests that SAEs promote monosemanticity, no quantitative comparison has examined how concept activation distributions differ between SAEs and their base models. This paper provides the first systematic evaluation of SAEs against base models through activation distribution lens. We introduce a fine-grained concept separability score based on the JensenвЂ“Shannon distance, which captures how distinctly a neuron's activation distributions vary across concepts. Using two large language models (Gemma-2-2B and DeepSeek-R1) and multiple SAE variants across five datasets (including word-level and sentence-level), we show that SAEs reduce polysemanticity and achieve higher concept separability. To assess practical utility, we evaluate concept-level interventions using two strategies: full neuron masking and partial suppression. We find that, compared to base models, SAEs enable more precise concept-level control when using partial suppression. Building on this, we propose Attenuation via Posterior Probabilities (APP), a new intervention method that uses concept-conditioned activation distributions for targeted suppression. APP achieves the smallest perplexity increase while remaining highly effective at concept removal.

Evaluating Sparse Autoencoders for Monosemantic Representation

Access control is a cornerstone of secure computing, yet large language models often blur role boundaries by producing unrestricted responses. We study role-conditioned refusals, focusing on the LLM's ability to adhere to access control policies by answering when authorized and refusing when not. To evaluate this behavior, we created a novel dataset that extends the Spider and BIRD text-to-SQL datasets, both of which have been modified with realistic PostgreSQL role-based policies at the table and column levels. We compare three designs: (i) zero or few-shot prompting, (ii) a two-step generator-verifier pipeline that checks SQL against policy, and (iii) LoRA fine-tuned models that learn permission awareness directly. Across multiple model families, explicit verification (the two-step framework) improves refusal precision and lowers false permits. At the same time, fine-tuning achieves a stronger balance between safety and utility (i.e., when considering execution accuracy). Longer and more complex policies consistently reduce the reliability of all systems. We release RBAC-augmented datasets and code.

Role-Conditioned Refusals: Evaluating Access Control Reasoning in Large Language Models

Modern human labor is characterized by specialization; we train for years and develop particular tools that allow us to perform well across a variety of tasks. Similarly, specialized AI agents with task-specific tools or architectures often fail to generalize beyond their intended scope. In this work, we ask: *what is the minimal set of general tools for achieving generalizability across diverse domains?* We propose OpenHands-Versa, a single-agent system with a modest number of general tools like code execution, search engine, web browser and multimodal file viewer, for three practical domains: software engineering, deep research, and web browsing. Notably, OpenHands-Versa demonstrates superior or competitive performance over task-specific specialized agents on three challenging benchmarks: SWE-Bench Multimodal, GAIA, and The Agent Company, with absolute improvements in success rate of **9.1**, **1.3**, and **9.1 points**, respectively. Thus, our minimal *single-agent* system can achieve strong generalization indicating that specialist agents provide no practical benefit. Furthermore, we find that specialist multi-agent systems do not generalize beyond their intended scope. These findings establish OpenHands-Versa as a strong baseline for future research.

Coding Agents with Multimodal Browsing are Generalist Problem Solvers

Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn tasks exposes notable limitations, particularly in scenarios requiring long-horizon reasoning. To address these challenges, we investigate more stable and effective advantage estimation strategies, especially for multi-turn settings. We first explore Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as an alternative and find it to be more robust than GRPO. To further enhance PPO in multi-turn scenarios, we introduce turn-PPO, a variant that operates on a turn-level MDP formulation, as opposed to the commonly used token-level MDP. Our results on the WebShop and Sokoban datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of turn-PPO, both with and without long reasoning components.

Turn-PPO: Turn-Level Advantage Estimation with PPO for Improved Multi-Turn RL in Agentic LLMs

Modern language models are trained on large scrapes of the Web, containing millions of personal information (PI) instances, many of which language models (LMs) memorize, increasing privacy risks. In this work, we develop the regexes and rules (R&R) detector suite to detect email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses, which outperforms the best regex-based PI detectors. On a manually curated set of 483 instances of PI, we measure memorization and parroting: finding that 13.6% are parroted verbatim by the Pythia-6.9b model, i.e. when the model is prompted with the tokens that precede the PI in the original document, greedy decoding generates the entire PI span exactly. We expand this analysis to study models of varying sizes (160M-6.9B) and timesteps of pretraining (70k-143k iterations) on the Pythia model suite and find that both model size and amount of pretraining are positively correlated with memorization. Even the smallest model, Pythia-160m, parrots 2.7% of the instances exactly. Consequently, we strongly recommend that pretraining datasets be aggressively filtered and anonymized to minimize PI parroting.

Personal Information Parroting in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across multilingual applications that handle sensitive data, yet their scale and linguistic variability introduce major privacy risks. Mostly evaluated for English, this paper investigates how language structure affects privacy leakage in LLMs trained on English, Spanish, French, and Italian medical corpora. We quantify six linguistic indicators and evaluate three attack vectors: extraction, counterfactual memorization, and membership inference. Results show that privacy vulnerability scales with linguistic redundancy and tokenization granularity: Italian exhibits the strongest leakage, while English shows higher membership separability. In contrast, French and Spanish display greater resilience due to higher morphological complexity. Overall, our findings provide the first quantitative evidence that language matters in privacy leakage, underscoring the need for language-aware privacy-preserving mechanisms in LLM deployments.

The Model's Language Matters: A Comparative Privacy Analysis of LLMs

Mathematical reasoning remains one of the most challenging domains for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only linguistic understanding but also structured logical deduction and numerical precision. While recent LLMs demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning abilities, their mathematical competence across diverse languages remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on English or a narrow subset of high-resource languages, leaving significant gaps in assessing multilingual and cross-lingual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we introduce MATHMIST, a parallel multilingual benchmark for mathematical problem solving and reasoning. MATHMIST encompasses 2,890 parallel Bangla-English gold standard artifacts, totaling approximately 30K aligned question--answer pairs across thirteen languages, representing an extensive coverage of high-, medium-, and low-resource linguistic settings. The dataset captures linguistic variety, multiple types of problem settings, and solution synthesizing capabilities. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including open-source small and medium LLMs, proprietary systems, and multilingual-reasoning-focused models under zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), perturbated reasoning, and code-switched reasoning paradigms. Our results reveal persistent deficiencies in LLMs' ability to perform consistent and interpretable mathematical reasoning across languages, with pronounced degradation in low-resource settings. 

MathMist: A Parallel Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Mathematical Problem Solving and Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in creative tasks. However, a formal and systematic assessment of creativity capabilities in LLMs is still missing, which limits our understanding of how capable LLMs are in generating content that is diverse and contextually relevant. The widely used Divergent Association Task (DAT) focuses on novelty, ignoring appropriateness, a core component of creativity. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art LLMs on DAT and show that their results on the task are lower than those of two baselines that do not possess any creative abilities, highlighting its critical shortcomings. Grounded in human creativity theory, which defines creativity as the combination of novelty and appropriateness, we introduce the Conditional Divergent Association Task (CDAT). CDAT conditions novelty on cue appropriateness, separating noise from creativity better than DAT, while remaining simple and objective. Under CDAT, smaller model families often show most creativity, whereas advanced families favor appropriateness at lower novelty; We hypothesize training and alignment likely shift models along this frontier, making outputs more appropriate but less creative. We will release the dataset and code to ensure reproducibility.

Beyond Divergent Creativity: A Human-Based Evaluation of Creativity in Large Language Models

Emotion classification on social media is especially difficult when texts include informal, culturally grounded language like slang. Standard NLP benchmarks often miss these nuances, particularly in low-resource settings. We present SLANG-GraphRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that integrates a culture-specific slang knowledge graph into large language models via one-shot prompting. Using multiple retrieval strategies, we incorporate slang definitions, regional usage, and conversational context. Our results show that incorporating structured cultural knowledge into the retrieval process leads to significant improvements, improving accuracy by up to 31% and F1 score by 28%, outperforming traditional and unstructured retrieval methods. To better evaluate model behavior, we propose a probabilistic metric that reflects the distribution of human annotations, providing a more nuanced measure of performance. This highlights the value of culturally sensitive applications and more balanced evaluation in subjective NLP tasks.

SLANG-GraphRAG: Multi-Layered Retrieval with Domain-Specific Knowledge for Low Resource Social Media Conversations

Neural audio codecs have recently enabled high-fidelity reconstruction at high compression rates, especially for speech. However, speech and non-speech audio exhibit fundamentally different spectral characteristics: speech energy concentrates in narrow bands around pitch harmonics (80-400 Hz), while non-speech audio requires faithful reproduction across the full spectrum, particularly preserving higher frequencies that define timbre and texture. This poses a challengeвЂ”speech-optimized neural codecs suffer degradation on music or sound. Treating the full spectrum holistically is suboptimal: frequency bands have vastly different information density and perceptual importance by content type, yet full-band approaches apply uniform capacity across frequencies without accounting for these acoustic structures. To address this gap, we propose **BSCodec** (Band-Split Codec), a novel neural audio codec architecture that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. Experimental results demonstrate that BSCodec achieves superior reconstruction over baselines across sound and music, while maintaining competitive quality in the speech domain, when trained on the same combined dataset of speech, music and sound. Downstream benchmark tasks further confirm that BSCodec shows strong potential for use in downstream applications.

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