Morocco

Existing machine learning engineering (MLE) agents struggle to iteratively optimize their implemented algorithms for effectiveness. To address this, we introduce MLE-Ideator, a dual-agent framework that separates ideation from implementation. In our system, an implementation agent can request strategic help from a dedicated Ideator. We show this approach is effective in two ways. First, in a prompting-based setup, our framework significantly outperforms implementation-only agent baselines on MLE-Bench. Second, we demonstrate that the Ideator can be trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to generate more effective ideas. With only 1K training samples from 10 MLE tasks, our RL-trained Qwen3-8B Ideator achieves an 11.5% relative improvement compared to its prompted counterpart and surpasses Claude Sonnet 3.5. These results highlight that enabling LLM agents to learn to ideate offers a promising path toward strategic AI systems for scientific discovery.

EACL 2026

Learning to Ideate for Machine Learning Engineering Agents

machine learning engineering

large language model

ai agent

reinforcement learning

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.

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. 

Are large language models (LLMs) sensitive to the distinction between humanly possible languages and humanly impossible languages? This question is taken by many to bear on whether LLMs and humans share the same innate learning biases. Previous work has attempted to answer it in the positive by comparing LLM learning curves on existing language datasets and on "impossible" datasets derived from them via various perturbation functions. Using the same methodology, we examine this claim on a wider set of languages and impossible perturbations. We find that in most cases, GPT-2 learns each language and its impossible counterpart equally easily, in contrast to previous claims. We also apply a more lenient condition by testing whether GPT-2 provides any kind of separation between the whole set of natural languages and the whole set of impossible languages. By considering cross-linguistic variance in various metrics computed on the perplexity curves, we show that GPT-2 provides no systematic separation between the possible and the impossible. Taken together, these perspectives show that LLMs do not share the human innate biases that shape linguistic typology.

Biasless Language Models Learn Unnaturally: How LLMs Fail to Distinguish the Possible from the Impossible

We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is mixed regarding whether training on easier or harder data leads to better results, and whether those gains come on easier or harder test data. We address this question by conducting a systematic evaluation of LLMs' generalization across models, datasets, and fine-grained groups of example difficulty. We rank examples in six datasets using the outputs of thousands of different LLMs and Item Response Theory (IRT), a well-established difficulty metric in educational testing. Unlike prior work, our difficulty ratings are therefore determined solely by the abilities of many different LLMs, excluding human opinions of difficulty. With a more objective, larger-scale, and finer-grained analysis, we show that cross-difficulty generalization is often limited; training on either easy or hard data cannot achieve consistent improvements across the full range of difficulties. These results show the importance of having a range of difficulties in both training and evaluation data for LLMs, and that taking shortcuts with respect to difficulty is risky.

Revisiting Generalization Across Difficulty Levels: It's Not So Easy

Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution and theory-of-mind reasoning, both of which require substantial pragmatic understanding. However, how LLMs acquire this pragmatic competence throughout the training process remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce ALTPRAG, a dataset grounded in the pragmatic concept of alternatives, to evaluate whether LLMs at different training stages can accurately infer nuanced speaker intentions. Each instance pairs two equally plausible yet pragmatically divergent continuations and requires the model to (i) infer the speaker's intended meaning and (ii) explain when and why a speaker would choose one utterance over its alternative, thus directly probing pragmatic competence through contrastive reasoning. We systematically evaluate 22 LLMs across 3 key training stages: after pre-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and preference optimization, to examine the development of pragmatic competence. Our results show that even base models exhibit notable sensitivity to pragmatic cues, which improves consistently with increases in model and data scale. Additionally, SFT and RLHF contribute further gains, particularly in cognitive-pragmatic scenarios. These findings highlight pragmatic competence as an emergent and compositional property of LLM training and offer new insights for aligning models with human communicative norms.

The Pragmatic Mind of Machines: Tracing the Emergence of Pragmatic Competence in Large Language Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) emerges as a key feature for Large Language Models (LLMs), allowing them to adapt to new tasks by leverageing task-specific examples without updating model parameters. However, ICL faces challenges with increasing numbers of examples due to performance degradation and quadratic computational costs. In this paper, we propose Logit Arithmetic Reweighting Approach (LARA), a novel framework that enhances ICL by using logit-based ensembling of multiple demonstrations. Our approach divides long input demonstrations into parallelizable shorter inputs to significantly reduce memory requirements, and then effectively aggregate the information by reweighting logits of each group via a non-gradient optimization approach. We further introduce Binary LARA (B-LARA), a variant that constrains weights to binary values to simplify the search space and reduces memory usage by filtering out less informative demonstration groups. Experiments on BBH and MMLU demonstrate that LARA and B-LARA outperform all baseline methods in both accuracy and memory efficiency. We also conduct extensive analysis to show that LARA generalizes well to scenarios of varying numbers of examples from limited to many-shot demonstrations.

Divide, Reweight, and Conquer: A Logit Arithmetic Approach for In-Context Learning

Continual learning in natural language processing plays a crucial role in adapting to evolving data and preventing catastrophic forgetting. Despite significant progress, existing methods still face challenges, such as inefficient parameter reuse across tasks, risking catastrophic forgetting when tasks are dissimilar, and the unnecessary introduction of new parameters for each task, which hampers knowledge sharing among similar tasks. To tackle these issues, we propose a Sparse Adapter Fusion Method (SAFM), which dynamically fuses old and new adapters to address these challenges. SAFM operates in two stages: the decision stage and the tuning stage. In the decision stage, SAFM determines whether to incorporate a new adapter, reuse an existing one, or add an empty adapter. The architecture search procedure, designed to prioritize reusing or adding empty adapters, minimizes parameter consumption and maximizes reuse. In the tuning stage, SAFM especially facilitates a layer-wise loss to encourage differentiation between adapters, effectively capturing knowledge within the same task. Experimental results consistently show that SAFM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving comparable performance while utilizing less than 60% of the parameters.

Sparse Adapter Fusion for Continual Learning in NLP

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) aim to determine whether a specific example was used to train a given language model. While prior work has explored prompt-based attacks such as ReCALL, these methods rely heavily on the assumption that using known non-members as prompts reliably suppresses the model's responses to non-member queries. We propose EM-MIA, a new membership inference approach that iteratively refines prefix effectiveness and membership scores using an expectation-maximization strategy without requiring labeled non-member examples. To support controlled evaluation, we introduce OLMoMIA, a benchmark that enables analysis of MIA robustness under systematically varied distributional overlap and difficulty. Experiments on WikiMIA and OLMoMIA show that EM-MIA outperforms existing baselines, particularly in settings with clear distributional separability. We highlight scenarios where EM-MIA succeeds in practical settings with partial distributional overlap, while failure cases expose fundamental limitations of current MIA methods under near-identical conditions. We will release our code and evaluation pipeline upon publication to encourage reproducible and robust MIA research.

Detecting Training Data of Large Language Models via Expectation Maximization

Temporal reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and is crucial for various real-world applications. While recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated promising capabilities in temporal reasoning, existing benchmarks primarily rely on rule-based construction, lack contextual depth, and involve a limited range of temporal entities. To address these limitations, we introduce Chinese Time Reasoning (CTM), a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on temporal reasoning within the extensive scope of Chinese dynastic chronology. CTM emphasizes cross-entity relationships, pairwise temporal alignment, and contextualized and culturally-grounded reasoning, providing a comprehensive evaluation. Extensive experimental results reveal the challenges posed by CTM and highlight potential avenues for improvement.

Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning and Alignment Across Chinese Dynasties

We model Semantic Self-Verification (SSV) as the problem of determining whether a statement accurately characterizes its own semantic properties within a given interpretive framework that formalizes a challenge in AI safety and fairness: can an AI system verify that it has correctly interpreted rules intended to govern its behavior? We prove that SSV, in this specification, is NP-complete by constructing a polynomial-time reduction from 3-Satisfiability (3-SAT). Our reduction maps a 3-SAT formula to an instance of SSV involving ambiguous terms with binary interpretations and semantic constraints derived from logical clauses. This establishes that even simplified forms of semantic self-verification should face computational barriers. The NP-complete lower bound has implications for AI safety and fairness approaches that rely on semantic interpretation of instructions, including but not limited to constitutional AI, alignment via natural language, and instruction-following systems. Any approach where an AI system verify its understanding of directives faces this computational barrier. We argue that more realistic verification scenarios likely face even greater complexity.

NP-Hard Lower Bound Complexity for Semantic Self-Verification

As Large Language Models(LLMs) increasingly power chatbots, social media, and other interactive platforms, the ability to detect AI in conversational settings is critical for ensuring transparency and preventing potential misuse. However, existing detection methods focus on static, document-level content, overlooking the dynamic nature of dialogues. To address this, we propose an utterance-level detection framework, which integrates features from individual and combined analysis of dialogue participants' responses to detect LLM-generated text under conversational setting. Leveraging a transformer-based recurrent architecture and a curated dataset of human-human, human-LLM, and LLM-LLM dialogues, this framework achieves an accuracy of 98.14% with high inference speed, supported by extensive results of experiments on different models and settings. This work provides an effective solution for detecting LLM-generated text in real-time conversations, promoting transparency, and mitigating risks of misuse.

Utterance-level Detection Framework for LLM-Involved Content Detection in Conversational Setting

This paper investigates the real-world vulnerabilities of audio-based large language models (ALLMs), such as Qwen2-Audio. We first demonstrate that an adversary can craft stealthy audio perturbations to manipulate ALLMs into exhibiting specific targeted behaviors, such as eliciting responses to wake-keywords (e.g., "Hey Qwen"), or triggering harmful behaviors (e.g., "Change my calendar event"). Subsequently, we show that playing adversarial background noise during user interaction with the ALLMs can significantly degrade the response quality. Crucially, our research illustrates the scalability of these attacks to real-world scenarios, impacting other innocent users when these adversarial noises are played through the air. Further, we discuss the transferability of the attack and potential defensive measures.

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