United States

The increasing reliance on cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) exposes sensitive client data, such as prompts and responses, to potential privacy breaches by service providers.
Existing approaches fail to ensure privacy, maintain model performance, and preserve computational efficiency simultaneously.
To address this challenge, we propose Talaria, a confidential inference framework that partitions the LLM pipeline between a client-verified Confidential Virtual Machine (CVM) and the public cloud to protect client data without compromising the cloud&#39;s model intellectual property or inference quality.
The interaction between the CVM and the cloud is secured by our Reversible Masked Outsourcing (ReMO) protocol, which uses a hybrid masking technique to reversibly obscure intermediate data before outsourcing computations.
Extensive evaluations show that Talaria can defend against state-of-the-art token inference attacks, reducing token reconstruction accuracy from over 97.5\% to an average of 1.34\%, all while being a lossless mechanism that guarantees output identical to the original model without significantly decreasing efficiency and scalability.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that ensures clients’ prompts and responses remain inaccessible to the cloud, while also preserving model privacy, performance, and efficiency.

ACL 2026

Your Inference Request Will Become a Black Box: Confidential Inference for Cloud-based Large Language Models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

The increasing reliance on cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) exposes sensitive client data, such as prompts and responses, to potential privacy breaches by service providers.
Existing approaches fail to ensure privacy, maintain model performance, and preserve computational efficiency simultaneously.
To address this challenge, we propose Talaria, a confidential inference framework that partitions the LLM pipeline between a client-verified Confidential Virtual Machine (CVM) and the public cloud to protect client data without compromising the cloud's model intellectual property or inference quality.
The interaction between the CVM and the cloud is secured by our Reversible Masked Outsourcing (ReMO) protocol, which uses a hybrid masking technique to reversibly obscure intermediate data before outsourcing computations.
Extensive evaluations show that Talaria can defend against state-of-the-art token inference attacks, reducing token reconstruction accuracy from over 97.5\% to an average of 1.34\%, all while being a lossless mechanism that guarantees output identical to the original model without significantly decreasing efficiency and scalability.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that ensures clients’ prompts and responses remain inaccessible to the cloud, while also preserving model privacy, performance, and efficiency.

poster

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for understanding large codebases, but whether they understand operational semantics of long code context or rely on pattern matching shortcuts remains unclear. We distinguish between lexical recall (retrieving code verbatim) and semantic recall (understanding operational semantics). Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that while frontier models achieve near-perfect, position-independent lexical recall, semantic recall degrades severely when code is centrally positioned in long contexts. We introduce semantic recall sensitivity to measure whether tasks require understanding of code's operational semantics vs. permit pattern matching shortcuts. Through a novel counterfactual measurement method, we show that models rely heavily on pattern matching shortcuts to solve existing code understanding benchmarks. We propose a new task SemTrace, which achieves high semantic recall sensitivity through unpredictable operations; LLMs' accuracy exhibits severe positional effects, with median accuracy drops of 92.73% versus CRUXEval's 53.36% as the relevant code snippet approaches the middle of the input code context. Our findings suggest current evaluations substantially underestimate semantic recall failures in long context code understanding.

Sense and Sensitivity: Examining the Influence of Semantic Recall on Long Context Code Understanding

Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) adhere to safety principles without refusing benign requests remains a significant challenge. While OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance the safety of its o-series models through reasoning over detailed ``code-like'' safety rules, the effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs, which typically lack advanced reasoning capabilities, is understudied. In this work, we systematically evaluate the impact of explicitly specifying extensive safety codes versus demonstrating them through illustrative cases. We find that referencing explicit codes inconsistently improves harmlessness and systematically degrades helpfulness, whereas training on case-augmented simple codes yields more robust and generalized safety behaviors. By guiding LLMs with case-augmented reasoning instead of extensive code-like safety rules, we avoid rigid adherence to narrowly enumerated rules and enable broader adaptability. Building on these insights, we propose CADA, a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for LLMs utilizing reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains. CADA effectively enhances harmlessness, improves robustness against attacks, and reduces over-refusal while preserving utility across diverse benchmarks, offering a practical alternative to rule-only DA for improving safety while maintaining helpfulness.

Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety

Unified multimodal models aim to jointly enable visual understanding and generation, yet current benchmarks rarely examine their true integration. Existing evaluations either treat the two abilities in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. To address this gap, we present \textbf{Uni-MMMU}, a comprehensive and discipline-aware benchmark that systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains, including science, coding, mathematics, and puzzles. Each task is \textit{bidirectionally coupled}, demanding models to (i) leverage conceptual understanding to guide precise visual synthesis, or (ii) utilize generation as a cognitive scaffold for analytical reasoning. Uni-MMMU incorporates verifiable intermediate reasoning steps, unique ground truths, and a reproducible scoring protocol for both textual and visual outputs. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art unified, generation-only, and understanding-only models, we reveal substantial performance disparities and cross-modal dependencies, offering new insights into \textit{when and how} these abilities reinforce one another, and establishing a reliable foundation for advancing unified models.

Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark

Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows, their capabilities remain limited in supporting high-quality scientific writing. Most existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of research communication beyond surface-level polishing, for example, maintaining conceptual coherence across sections. Furthermore, academic writing is inherently iterative and revision-driven, a process that is not well supported by direct prompting-based paradigms. To address these scenarios, we propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision, centered on criteria-guided intent alignment and context-aware modeling. To validate the framework, we curate a dataset of 7,000 research papers from top-tier venues, annotated with 140,000 instruction–response pairs that reflect realistic, section-level scientific revisions. We instantiate the framework in XtraGPT, the first suite of open-source LLMs (1.5B to 14B parameters) specifically fine-tuned for context-aware academic paper revision. Extensive experiments show that XtraGPT significantly outperforms same-scale baselines and rivals the quality of proprietary counterparts. Both automated preference assessments and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of XtraGPT in improving scientific drafts. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/XtraGPT and https://huggingface.co/collections/Xtra-Computing/xtragpt.

 XtraGPT: Context-Aware and Controllable Academic Paper Revision via Human-AI Collaboration

Large language models (LLMs) are shaping global values, yet they frequently exhibit a pronounced WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural bias, marginalizing diverse viewpoints and posing challenges for reconciling diverse populations with varying cultural backgrounds and value systems. In this work, we move beyond simple alignment methods to propose a new paradigm for cross-cultural fairness. We introduce a \textit{Nash Consensus Negotiation} framework under the formulation of cross-cultural consensus as a Nash Equilibrium. Each LLM iteratively proposes and refines natural-language guidelines, guided by a utility function balancing self-consistency with mutual acceptance, while penalizing redundancy. The process expands the proposal space and converges to a consensus, yielding fair and interpretable consensus outcomes. We evaluate our framework against baselines using quantitative metrics, qualitative analysis, and large-scale human studies. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates higher-quality and more balanced consensus, effectively mitigating assimilation toward WEIRD values. Furthermore, we finetune diverse LLM architectures with negotiation data via preference optimization and supervised reasoning, reducing cultural distances by up to 95.53%. Overall, our work offers a systematic path to mitigate cultural bias in LLMs by guiding them toward self-consistency, mutually-acceptable equilibria.

A Game-Theoretica Negotiation Framework for Cross-Cultural Consensus

Extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a promising paradigm, as it requires neither additional data nor fine-tuning. Existing methods incorporate conditions into prompts to guide LLMs to focus on specific aspects and elicit conditional text embeddings. However, relying solely on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional text embeddings, as they remain entangled with general text embeddings, ultimately degrading their quality. To this end, we propose an inference-time, plug-and-play Self-Contrastive Steering (SCS) method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeddings, making them more focused on the target condition. Specifically, we modify the attention mask and positional encodings to mask the condition, thereby obtaining unconditional text embeddings and intervening in the multi-head self-attention computation process. Notably, our method is highly efficient, requiring only a single additional multi-head self-attention computation at inference time. Extensive experiments on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets demonstrate that our method can seamlessly improve the performance of existing prompt-based methods across different LLMs in a training-free and plug-and-play manner.

Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs

Referring multimodal large language models enable users to ground queries to specific image regions via spatial prompts, supporting fine-grained referring dialogue. However, existing methods rely on extensive fine-tuning to mitigate attention distraction, which incurs high computational costs and limits adaptability. Without sufficient training data, irrelevant regions in single images easily divert model focus, leading to redundant outputs or hallucinations. To address this, we propose CoreGaze, a training-free framework that simulates human visual gaze diffusion for fine-grained comprehension. First, CoreGaze constructs a sparse semantic graph from visual tokens, modeling region-wise affinities via thresholded similarity. It then maps the user's visual prompt to a core subgraph with amplified initial influence, which drives a degree-normalized diffusion process using restart-equipped random walks to propagate relevance to contextual neighborhoods. This process prunes irrelevant tokens while preserving user-indicated targets and semantically linked context, distilling a focused yet comprehensive subgraph. Finally, CoreGaze fuses this subgraph with prompt tokens in the frozen large language model decoder, facilitating fine-grained referring generation. Experimental results show that CoreGaze achieves outstanding performance in multiple referring dialogue tasks, showcasing its effectiveness.

 CoreGaze: Core Subgraph-Driven Visual Gaze Diffusion for Training-Free Referring Multimodal Large Language Models

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a cornerstone of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Yet, its efficacy is hampered by two fundamental limitations: $\textit{semantic drift}$, arising from treating all update directions with equal importance, and $\textit{structural incoherence}$, due to adapting layers independently, resulting in uncoordinated and suboptimal updates. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{StructLoRA}$, a framework that tackles both limitations through a principled dual-component design: (1) an Information Bottleneck-guided filter that prunes task-irrelevant directions to mitigate semantic drift, and (2) a lightweight, training-only graph-based coordinator that enforces inter-layer consistency to resolve structural incoherence. Extensive experiments across large language models, vision language models, and vision models (including LLaMA, LLaVA, and ViT) demonstrate that $\textbf{StructLoRA}$ consistently establishes a new state of the art, outperforming not only vanilla LoRA but also advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. Notably, the gains are particularly pronounced in challenging low-rank and low-data regimes. Crucially, since the proposed modules operate only during training, $\textbf{StructLoRA}$ improves performance with $\textbf{zero additional inference cost}$, shifting the focus of PEFT from mere parameter compression to a more holistic optimization of information quality and structural integrity.

Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet they often suffer from producing unnecessary and verbose reasoning chains. We identify a core aspect of this issue as ''invalid thinking''--- models tend to repeatedly double-check their work after having derived the correct answer. To address this specific inefficiency, we move beyond the general principles of Efficacy and Efficiency to propose two new, fine-grained principles: Brevity, which advocates for eliminating redundancy, and Sufficiency, which ensures critical reasoning steps are preserved. Guided by these principles, we introduce LC-R1, a post-training method based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). LC-R1 employs a novel combination of a Length Reward for overall conciseness and a Compress Reward that is specifically designed to remove the invalid portion of the thinking process. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that LC-R1 achieves a significant reduction in sequence length (\~50%) with only a marginal (\~2%) drop in accuracy, achieving a favorable trade-off point on the Pareto frontier that prioritizes high compression. Our analysis further validates the robustness of LC-R1 and provides valuable insights for developing more powerful yet computationally efficient LRMs.

Optimizing Length Compression in Large Reasoning Models

Recent proprietary video generation models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in synthesizing highly realistic videos from textual instructions. Most open-source text-to-video models, however, still struggle to accurately simulate real-world physics and dynamic entity interactions. Existing approaches rely on scaling laws and large-scale, high-quality video datasets to implicitly learn physical dynamics, yet this paradigm is constrained by prohibitive costs and the burdensome demands of data curation. Motivated by this, we propose a novel framework that integrates graph-structured temporal knowledge into video latent diffusion models to enhance compositional generation and interaction fidelity. Our framework constructs video scene graphs specifically designed to capture entity relationships, temporal dynamics, and global scene context. These graph-structured representations guide the generation process through cross-attention mechanisms. Additionally, we introduce Graph-Aligned Denoising Loss (GADL), a training objective that ensures adherence to conditioned graphs by incorporating node modification tasks within the denoising process, leveraging synchronized edited video-graph pairs. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that incorporating graph-structured knowledge significantly enhances compositionality and the accurate portrayal of real-world interactions in generated videos.

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Sense and Sensitivity: Examining the Influence of Semantic Recall on Long Context Code Understanding

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