United States

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.

ACL 2026

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

#### *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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EACL 2026

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. 

technical paper

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>
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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.

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.

 Bringing Real-World Relations into Video Generation with Graph-Structured Knowledge

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have enabled accurate imitation of reference speech in terms of both speaking style and speaker timbre. However, achieving disentangled control over these aspects from separate references remains a challenging task. Several studies have proposed disentangled speech representations that decompose speech into interpretable attributes ($\textit{e.g.}$, timbre, prosody, and content), providing a promising foundation for TTS with attribute control from separate references. Yet, how to effectively integrate such representations into TTS systems to achieve independent and precise control remains underexplored. In this paper, we present FC-TTS, a zero-shot TTS framework that enables disentangled control of style and timbre by conditioning on two distinct reference utterances. Unlike existing systems that inherit limitations from those pre-trained disentangled representations, FC-TTS introduces key design strategies, including architectural choices, training framework, and auxiliary training objectives, which improve the reliability of attribute separation and dual-reference control. Experiments show that FC-TTS achieves high-fidelity synthesis and competitive zero-shot naturalness, while uniquely supporting consistent and independent manipulation of style and timbre. Audio samples are available at \url{https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/fc-tts}

FC-TTS: Style and Timbre Control in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Disentangled Speech Representations

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical "modality collapse'' phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose Residual Semantic Steering (RSS), a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) Residual Affordance Steering, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations.

Stable Language Guidance for Vision–Language–Action Models

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but often generate harmful responses to malicious user queries. This paper investigates the underlying cause of these safety risks and shows that the issue lies in the reasoning structure itself. Based on this insight, we claim that effective safety alignment can be achieved by altering the reasoning structure. We propose AltTrain, a simple yet effective post-training method that explicitly alters the reasoning structure of LRMs. AltTrain is both practical and generalizable, requiring no complex reinforcement learning (RL) training or reward design—only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with a lightweight 1K training examples. Experiments across LRM backbones and model sizes demon strate strong safety alignment, along with robust generalization across reasoning, QA, summarization, and multilingual setting.

Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining. However, they remain prone to catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to identify noise accumulation in LoRA updates as a key cause of forgetting in continual learning. A preliminary two-task experiment demonstrates that removing less important components of the second task’s LoRA parameters improves performance on the first task, suggesting that later updates introduce noisy interference. Building on this insight, we propose **S**ubspace-Denoised **Lo**w-**R**ank **A**daptation (**SLoRA**), a simple and effective framework that filters noisy components from LoRA updates via subspace similarity with the base model. SLoRA is a regularization-free method without accessing data or gradients from previous tasks or modifying the training process. It offers two variants, SLoRA-Pre and SLoRA-Post, for online and offline continual learning, respectively. Extensive experiments across tasks and models validate the effectiveness of SLoRA. It improves final accuracy by up to 12%, reduces forgetting by 29%, and filters out over 30% of LoRA parameters identified as noisy. Our code is available at https://github.com/alina1031/SLoRA.

SLoRA: Balancing Plasticity and Forgetting in Large Language Models for Continual Learning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning–control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning–control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in LRMs via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

High-quality data is the cornerstone of advancing large language models. However, the field currently faces a critical dilemma: the supply of premium data is nearing depletion, while vast stale corpora remain underutilized. Our empirical analysis reveals that training models on such data directly often leads to performance degradation. We attribute this phenomenon to the data affinity gap, a misalignment stemming from the model's inability to effectively comprehend the data or inherent quality defects. To bridge this gap, we propose Restoring Stale Data Affinity (RSDA) framework. First, utilizing our proposed potential entropy metric, RSDA quantifies the latent value of samples to effectively identify stale data with higher renovation potential. Subsequently, the framework employs a dynamic renovation strategy selection mechanism to determine the optimal component-level strategy for each instance, transforming low-affinity stale samples into high-quality training data. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that RSDA effectively enhances data affinity, achieving performance improvements using less than 10% of the data volume, thereby underscoring that the latent potential of stale corpora remains largely untapped. The code is available at https://github.com/wenfiii/RSDA.

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