Morocco

Ensuring Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned with human valuesвЂ”being helpful, harmless, and honest (HHH)вЂ”is crucial for safe deployment. Existing methods use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to align LLMs. However, these methods face challenges in multi-objective settings: SFT leads to interference between conflicting goals, while MoEs suffer from miscalibrated routing. We term this failure mode Axis Collapse, marked by (1) disjoint feature spaces causing catastrophic forgetting, and (2) unreliable inference from misrouted experts. To address this, we propose AlignX, a two-stage alignment framework. Stage 1 uses prompt-injected fine-tuning to extract axis-specific task features, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Stage 2 deploys a MoCaE module that calibrates expert routing using fractal and natural geometry, improving inference reliability. AlignX achieves significant gains on Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty), with +171.5% win rate, +110.1% in truthfulness-informativeness, and 4.3% fewer safety violations. It also reduces latency and memory usage by over 35% compared to prior MoEs. Results across four LLMs validate its generalizability. Code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AlignX-40BE/README.md

EACL 2026

When the Model Said &quot;No Comment&quot;, We Knew Helpfulness Was Dead, Honesty Was Alive, and Safety Was Terrified

alignment

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

When the Model Said "No Comment", We Knew Helpfulness Was Dead, Honesty Was Alive, and Safety Was Terrified

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. 

Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual promptsвЂ”especially those describing complex sound events. We uncover a surprising capability in AR audio generators: their early prefix tokens implicitly encode global semantic attributes of the final output, such as event count and sound-object category, revealing a form of implicit planning. Building on this insight, we propose Plan-Critic, a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE)-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. At inference time, Plan-Critic enables guided exploration: it evaluates candidate prefixes early, prunes low-fidelity trajectories, and reallocates computation to high-potential planning seeds. Our Plan-Critic-guided sampling achieves up to a 10 points improvement in CLAP score over the AR baselineвЂ”establishing a new state of the art in AR text-to-audio generationвЂ”while maintaining computational parity with standard best-of-N decoding. This work bridges the gap between causal generation and global semantic alignment, demonstrating that even strictly autoregressive models can plan ahead.

Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding

Does the prior knowledge of the vision encoder constrain the capability boundary of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? While most existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, the impact of vision encoder's prior knowledge is seldom investigated. In this work, we introduce a novel metric Rank e to quantify the effect of prior knowledge of the vision encoder on MLLM performance. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior knowledge and MLLM performance. Moreover, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning using solely end-to-end visual question answering (VQA) data is insufficient, particularly for entities with low inherent visual prior knowledge. To address this issue, we propose VisPRE (Vision Prior Remediation), a two-stage training framework that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level. Experimental results demonstrate that augmenting vision encoder's prior knowledge substantially boosts the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs, offering a novel and effective strategy for improving performance, especially in scenarios involving uncommon visual entities.

Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Fine-grained image-caption alignment is crucial for vision-language models (VLMs), especially in socially critical contexts such as identifying real-world risk scenarios or distinguishing cultural proxies, where correct interpretation hinges on subtle visual or linguistic clues and where minor misinterpretations can lead to significant real-world consequences. We present MiSCHiEF, a set of two benchmarking datasets (MiC and MiS) based on a contrastive pair design in the domains of safety and culture, and evaluate four VLMs on tasks requiring fine-grained differentiation of paired images and captions. In both datasets, each sample contains two minimally differing captions and corresponding minimally differing images. In MiS, the image-caption pairs depict a safe and an unsafe scenario, while in MiC, they depict cultural proxies in two distinct cultural contexts. We find that models generally perform better at confirming the correct image-caption pair than rejecting incorrect ones. Additionally, models achieve higher accuracy when selecting the correct caption from two highly similar captions for a given image, compared to the converse task. The results, overall, highlight persistent modality misalignment challenges in current VLMs, underscoring the difficulty of precise cross-modal grounding required for applications with subtle semantic and visual distinctions.

MiSCHiEF: A Benchmark in Minimal-Pairs of Safety and Culture for Holistic Evaluation of Fine-Grained Image-Caption Alignment

Hateful speech detection is a key component of content moderation, yet current evaluation frameworks rarely assess why a text is deemed hateful. We introduce \textsf{HateXScore}, a four-component metric suite designed to evaluate the reasoning quality of model explanations. It assesses (i) conclusion explicitness, (ii) faithfulness and causal grounding of quoted spans, (iii) protected group identification (policy-configurable), and (iv) logical consistency among these elements. Evaluated on six diverse hate speech datasets, \textsf{HateXScore} reveals interpretability failures and annotation inconsistencies that are invisible to standard metrics like Accuracy or F1. Moreover, human evaluation shows strong agreement with \textsf{HateXScore}, validating it as a practical tool for trustworthy and transparent moderation. \textcolor{red}{Disclaimer: This paper contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some readers.}

HateXScore: A Metric Suite for Evaluating Reasoning Quality in Hate Speech Explanations

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. However, they still lack human cognition to balance factuality and safety. Bearing the resemblance, we argue that both factual and safety failures in LLMs arise from a "concept misalignment'' in their internal representations rather than addressing those as entirely separate alignment issues. We hypothesize that an external network, trained to understand the fluctuations, can selectively intervene in the model to regulate falsehood into truthfulness and unsafe output into safe output without fine-tuning the model parameters themselves. Reflecting the hypothesis, we propose ARREST (Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth), a unified framework that identifies and corrects drifted features, engaging both soft and hard refusals in addition to factual corrections. Our empirical results show that ARREST not only regulates misalignment but is also more versatile compared to the RLHF-aligned modelsin generating soft refusals due to adversarial training. We make our codebase available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARREST-LLM .

ARREST: Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth in Large Language Models

Administrative phone tasks drain roughly 1 trillion annually from U.S. healthcare, with over 500 million insurance–benefit verification calls manually handled in 2024. We introduce INSURE-Dial, to our knowledge the first public benchmark for developing and assessing compliance-aware voice agents for phase-aware call auditing with span-based compliance verification. The corpus includes 50 de-identified, AI-initiated calls with live insurance representatives (mean 71 turns/call) and 1,000 synthetically generated calls that mirror the same workflow. All calls are annotated with a phase-structured JSON schema covering IVR navigation, patient identification, coverage status, medication checks (up to two drugs), and agent identification (CRN), and each phase is labeled for Information and Procedural compliance under explicit ask/answer logic. We define two novel evaluation tasks: (1) Phase Boundary Detection (span segmentation under phase-specific acceptance rules) and (2) Compliance Verification (IC/PC decisions given fixed spans). Per-phase scores are strong across small, low-latency baselines, but end-to-end reliability is constrained by span-boundary errors. On real calls, full-call exact segmentation is low, showing a gap between conversational fluency and audit-grade evidence.

INSURE-Dial: A Phase-Aware Conversational Dataset & Benchmark for Compliance Verification and Phase Detection

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising accuracy in predicting survey responses and policy preferences, which has increased interest in their potential to represent human interests in various domains. Most existing research has focused on "behavioral cloning", effectively evaluating how well models reproduce individuals' expressed preferences. Drawing on theories of political representation, we highlight an underexplored design trade-off: whether AI systems should act as "delegates", mirroring expressed preferences, or as "trustees", exercising judgment about what best serves an individual's interests. This trade-off is closely related to issues of LLM sycophancy, where models can encourage behavior or validate beliefs that may be aligned with a user's short-term preferences, but is detrimental to their long-term interests. Through a series of experiments simulating votes on various policy issues in the U.S. context, we apply a temporal utility framework that weighs short and long-term interests (simulating a trustee role) and compare voting outcomes to behavior-cloning models (simulating a delegate). We find that trustee-style predictions weighted toward long-term interests produce policy decisions that align more closely with expert consensus on well-understood issues, but also show greater bias toward models' default stances on topics lacking clear agreement. These findings reveal a fundamental trade-off in designing AI systems to represent human interests. Delegate models better preserve user autonomy but may diverge from well-supported policy positions, while trustee models can promote welfare on well-understood issues yet risk paternalism and bias on subjective topics.

From Delegates to Trustees: How Optimizing for Long-Term Interests Shapes Bias and Alignment in LLMs

Ancient people translated classical Chinese into Japanese by annotating around each character. We abstract this process as sequence tagging tasks and fit them into modern language technologies. The research of this annotation and translation system is a facing low-resource problem. We release this problem by introducing a LLM-based annotation pipeline and construct a new dataset from digitalized open-source translation data. We show that under the low-resource setting, introducing auxiliary Chinese NLP tasks has a promoting effect on the training of sequence tagging tasks. We also evaluate the performance of large language models. They achieve high scores in direct machine translation, but they are confused when being asked to annotate characters. Our method could work as the reinforcement of LLMs.

Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese

Commonsense reasoning (CSR) is a popular set of tasks used to evaluate large language model performance. However, what constitutes common sense might not apply to disabled people, leaving them out of AI progress by ignoring their identities. This paper investigates how datasets and models deal with disability in commonsense reasoning through a case study of three types of disabilities: autism, vision impairments, and long COVID. We first obtain annotations from disabled and non-disabled persons on n = 300 samples of three widely used CSR datasets (CommonsenseQA, Social IQA, Physical IQA) for ableism, which we define as entries in which gold labels assume a lack of disability, finding that 15% of entries contain ableism. Then, we investigate LLMs' ability to flag ableism in CSR instances, and their flexibility to adapt to disability contexts---whether the CSR gold answer changes if the person is disabled. Our results show that the three LLMs tested have low sensitivity to human-detected ableism occurrences but still detect 5 to 25% of entries as ableist. Our findings call into question whether relying on such assumption-laden commonsense reasoning benchmarks risks leaving disabled people behind in the AI world.

Common Sense or Ableism? Rethinking Commonsense Reasoning Through the Lens of Disability

Large Language Models exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. The need for effective mechanisms for behavioural manipulation of the model during generation is a critical gap in the literature that needs to be fulfilled. Personality-aware LLMs hold a promising direction towards this objective. However, the relationship between these psychological constructs and their representations within LLMs remains underexplored and requires further investigation. Moreover, it is intriguing to understand and study the use of these representations to steer the models' behaviour. We propose a novel pipeline that extracts hidden state activations from transformer layers using the Big Five Personality Traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), which is a comprehensive and empirically validated framework to model human personality applies low-rank subspace discovery methods, and identifies trait-specific optimal layers across different model architectures for robust injection. The resulting personality-aligned directions are then operationalised through a flexible steering framework with dynamic layer selection, enabling precise control of trait expression in LLM outputs. Our findings reveal that personality traits occupy a low-rank shared subspace, and that these latent structures can be transformed into actionable mechanisms for effective steering through careful perturbations without impacting the fluency, variance and general capabilities, helping to bridge the gap between psychological theory and practical model alignment

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Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding

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Too Helpful, Too Harmless, Too Honest or Just Right?