Morocco

Benchmarks for language models have become essential tools for research. Yet, such benchmarks face a persistent contamination problem, with recent studies finding 25-50% of evaluation datasets appearing in training corpora. This is true even looking at the two-player zero-sum game setting, where most benchmarks are based on popular games, like chess, whose optimal strategies are all over the web. Such contamination hinders the possibility to differentiate memorization and reasoning skills. To rectify these problems, we introduce TCG-Bench, a benchmark based on a new two-player trading card game (TCG), similar in spirit to games like Magic: The Gathering. TCG-Bench offers three key innovations: (1) a contamination-resistant design by separating the publicly released game engine from hidden card implementations, (2) a continuous difficulty spectrum via Monte Carlo simulation that prevents benchmark saturation, and (3) a parallel implementation in English and Arabic, the first multilingual text-based game benchmark to do so. We also formalize a practical threat model and refresh protocol that preserves evaluation integrity even if specific cards leak. Our analysis across 17 models (50,000+ games) reveals that performance declines exponentially with difficulty, while model size correlates only weakly with strategic ability. We also observe cross-linguistic performance gaps between English and Arabic, with a gap of 47.4% at 32B, highlighting the need for multilingual game benchmarks that target reasoning capabilities in the target language. We host a leaderboard showcasing these results and welcome evaluation requests on our private cards.

EACL 2026

Cards Against Contamination: TCG-Bench for Difficulty-Scalable Multilingual LLM Reasoning

long horizon planning

cards

contamination

llms

monte carlo

benchmark

language models

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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#### *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)* 

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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. 

Do large language models (LLMs) serve as proxies for human linguistic variation? We investigate this question through Hindi-English verb code-mixing, where speakers can use either a Hindi verb or an English verb with the light verb \textit{karna} (`do'). Both forms are grammatical, but speakers show gradient preferences without clear theoretical explanationвЂ”an ideal test of whether LLMs capture genuine sociolinguistic variation beyond formal rules. We collect preference ratings from 14 native speakers across 30 verb pairs in minimal pair contexts (moderate agreement, Krippendorff's О± = 0.365) and compare these to perplexity ratios from 7 base LLMs spanning families, sizes, and training compositions. Three experiments reveal systematic failure: unsupervised prediction performs at chance (F1 в‰¤ 0.33), supervised 4-way classification barely improves (F1 = 0.43), and binary classification achieves adequate performance (F1 = 0.81) for only one model after exhaustive feature searchвЂ”requiring the very human labels LLMs were meant to replace while discarding the gradient information linguists need. Models show no scaling effects and exhibit arbitrary systematic biases inconsistent with training data or human judgments. We conclude that current LLMs learn surface correlations without internalizing underlying sociolinguistic processes, and do not reliably model gradient linguistic variation. We release human ratings, perplexity ratios for 4,279 verb pairs across 7 models, and experimental materials.

Do LLMs model human linguistic variation? A case study in Hindi-English do-verb code-mixing

Transformers have become the standard in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) due to their strong performance, yet they remain highly sensitive to small input changes, often referred to as adversarial attacks, such as synonym swaps in text or pixel-level perturbations in images. These adversarial attacks can mislead predictions, while existing defenses are often domain-specific or lack formal robustness guarantees. We propose the Attention-Regularized Transformer (ART), a framework that enhances robustness across modalities. ART builds on the Attention Sensitivity Tensor (AST), which quantifies the effect of input perturbations on attention outputs. By incorporating an AST-based regularizer into training, ART encourages stable attention maps under adversarial perturbations in both text and image tasks. We evaluate ART on IMDB, QNLI, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Imagenette. Results show consistent robustness gains over strong baselines such as FreeLB and DSRM: up to +36.9% robust accuracy on IMDB and QNLI, and +5 – 25% on image benchmarks across multiple Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures, while maintaining or improving clean accuracy. ART is also highly efficient, training over 10x faster than adversarial methods on text and requiring only 1.25x the cost of standard training on images, compared to 1.5 – 5.5x for recent robust ViTs. Codes are available at [https://github.com/cliclab-um6p/ART](https://github.com/cliclab-um6p/ART)

ART: Attention-Regularized Transformers for Multi-Modal Robustness

The intersection of AI and legal systems presents a growing need for tools that support legal education, particularly in under-resourced languages such as Romanian. In this work, we aim to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in understanding and reasoning about Romanian driving law through textual and visual question-answering tasks. To facilitate this, we introduce RoD-TAL, a novel multimodal dataset comprising Romanian driving test questions, text-based and image-based, alongside annotated legal references and explanations written by human experts. We implement and assess retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, dense retrievers, and reasoning-optimized models across tasks, including Information Retrieval (IR), Question Answering (QA), Visual IR, and Visual QA. Our experiments demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning significantly enhances retrieval performance. At the same time, chain-of-thought prompting and specialized reasoning models improve QA accuracy, surpassing the minimum grades required to pass driving exams. We highlight the potential and the limitations of applying LLMs and VLMs to legal education.

RoD-TAL: A Benchmark for Answering Questions in Romanian Driving License Exams

This study introduces "Survey and Questionnaire Item Embeddings Differentials" (SQuID), a novel methodological approach that enables neural network embeddings to effectively recover latent dimensions from psychometric survey items. We demonstrate that embeddings derived from large language models, when processed with SQuID, can recover the structure of human values obtained from human rater judgments on the Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ-RR). Our experimental validation compares multiple embedding models across a number of evaluation metrics. Unlike previous approaches, SQuID successfully addresses the challenge of obtaining negative correlations between dimensions without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning. Quantitative analysis reveals that our embedding-based approach explains 55% of variance in dimension-dimension similarities compared to human data. Multidimensional scaling configurations from both types of data show fair factor congruence coefficients and largely follow the underlying theory. These results demonstrate that semantic embeddings can effectively replicate psychometric structures previously established through extensive human surveys. The approach offers substantial advantages in cost, scalability and flexibility while maintaining comparable quality to traditional methods. Our findings have significant implications for psychometrics and social science research, providing a complementary methodology that could expand the scope of human behavior and experience represented in measurement tools.

Neural network embeddings recover value dimensions from psychometric survey items on par with human data

Modern language models (LMs) are trained in an autoregressive manner, conditioned only on the prefix. In contrast, sequence labeling (SL) tasks assign labels to each individual input token, naturally benefiting from bidirectional context. This discrepancy has historically led SL to rely on inherently bidirectional encoder-only models. However, the rapid development of decoder-only models has raised the question of whether they can be adapted to SL. While causal mask removal has emerged as a viable technique for adapting decoder-only models to leverage the full context for SL, it requires considerable changes to the base model functionality. In this work, we explore sequence repetition (SR) as a less invasive alternative for enabling bidirectionality in decoder-only models. Through fine-tuning experiments, we show that SR inherently makes decoders bidirectional, improving the quality of token-level embeddings and surpassing encoders and unmasked decoders. Contrary to earlier claims, we find that increasing the number of repetitions does not degrade SL performance. Finally, we demonstrate that embeddings from intermediate layers are highly effective for SR, comparable to those from final layers, while being at least 1.33 times more efficient to compute. Our findings underscore that SR alleviates the structural limitations of decoders, enabling more efficient and adaptable LMs and broadening their applicability to other token-level tasks.

Sequence Repetition Enhances Token Embeddings and Improves Sequence Labeling with Decoder-only Language Models

Summarization of multi-party dialogues is a critical capability in industry, enhancing knowledge transfer and operational effectiveness across many domains. However, automatically generating high-quality summaries is challenging, as the ideal summary must satisfy a set of complex, multi-faceted requirements. While summarization has received immense attention in research, prior work has primarily utilized static datasets and benchmarks, a condition rare in practical scenarios where requirements inevitably evolve. In this work, we present an industry case study on developing an agentic system to summarize multi-party interactions. We share practical insights spanning the full development lifecycle to guide practitioners in building reliable, adaptable summarization systems, as well as to inform future research, covering: 1) robust methods for evaluation despite evolving requirements and task subjectivity, 2) component-wise optimization enabled by the task decomposition inherent in an agentic architecture, 3) the impact of upstream data bottlenecks, and 4) the realities of vendor lock-in due to the poor transferability of LLM prompts.

Lessons from the Field: An Adaptable Lifecycle Approach to Applied Dialogue Summarization

Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) are both helpful and harmless is a critical challenge, as overly strict constraints can lead to excessive refusals, while permissive models risk generating harmful content. Existing approaches, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO), attempt to balance these trade-offs but suffer from performance conflicts, limited controllability, and poor extendability. To address these issues, we propose Preference Vector, a novel framework inspired by task arithmetic. Instead of optimizing multiple preferences within a single objective, we train separate models on individual preferences, extract behavior shifts as preference vectors, and dynamically merge them at test time. This modular approach enables fine-grained, user-controllable preference adjustments and facilitates seamless integration of new preferences without retraining. Experiments show that our proposed Preference Vector framework improves helpfulness without excessive conservatism, allows smooth control over preference trade-offs, and supports scalable multi-preference alignment.

Adaptive HelpfulnessвЂ“Harmlessness Alignment with Preference Vectors

Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective for data augmentation in classification tasks like intent detection. In some cases, they inadvertently produce examples that are ambiguous with regard to untargeted classes. We present DDAIR (Disambiguated Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition) to mitigate this problem. We use Sentence Transformers to detect ambiguous class-guided augmented examples generated by LLMs for intent recognition in low-resource scenarios. We identify synthetic examples that are semantically more similar to another intent than to their target one. We also provide an iterative re-generation method to mitigate such ambiguities. Our findings show that sentence embeddings effectively help to (re)generate less ambiguous examples, and suggest promising potential to improve classification performance in scenarios where intents are loosely or broadly defined.

How DDAIR you? Disambiguated Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition

Eliciting cooperation in multi-agent LLM systems is critical for AI alignment. We investigate two approaches: direct communication and curriculum learning. In a 4-player Stag Hunt, a one-word "cheap talk" channel increases cooperation from 0% to 48.3%, demonstrating communication as a robust coordination mechanism. In contrast, we find that curriculum learning is highly sensitive to design choices: our pedagogical curriculum through progressively complex games reduced agent payoffs by 27.4% in an Iterated Public Goods Game with Punishment. Qualitative analysis reveals that curricula emphasizing defection-equilibrium games can induce "learned pessimism" in agents. These findings suggest that for coordination problems, simple communication protocols may be more reliable than experience-based training, and that curriculum design for social dilemmas requires careful attention to the strategic lessons embedded in game sequences.

Communication Enables Cooperation in LLM Agents: A Comparison with Curriculum-Based Approaches

Ensuring the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge. Existing approaches often rely on invasive fine- tuning or external generation-based checks, which can be opaque and resource-inefficient. In this work, we investigate the geometry of safety concepts within pretrained representations, proposing a mechanistic methodology that identifies the layer where safe and unsafe concepts are maximally separable within a pretrained model’s representation space. By leveraging the intrinsic activation space of the optimal layer, we show that safety enforcement can be achieved via a simple linear classifier, avoiding the need for weight modification. We validate our framework across multiple domains (regulation, law, finance, cybersecurity, education, code, human resources, and social media), diverse tasks (safety classification, prompt injection, and toxicity detection), and 16 non-English languages on both encoder and decoder architectures. Our results show that: (i) the separation between safe and unsafe concepts emerges from a single layer direction in the activation space, (ii) monitoring internal representations provides a significantly more robust safeguarding mechanism compared to traditional evaluative or generative guardrail paradigms.

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Do LLMs model human linguistic variation? A case study in Hindi-English do-verb code-mixing

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