United States

Recent efforts on text-to-audio (TTA) generation are starting to explore fine-grained controllability, e.g., precise timing control, with innovations on conditioning techniques or training-free latent manipulations. However, constrained by data scarcity, their generation performance at scale is still limited. In this study, we recast high-controllability TTA generation as a multi-task learning problem, and introduce a progressive diffusion modeling approach, ControlAudio. Our method adeptly fits distributions conditioned on fine-grained information, including text, timing, and phoneme features, through a step-by-step strategy. First, we propose a data construction method spanning both annotation and simulation, augmenting condition information in the sequence of text, timing, and phoneme. Second, at the model training stage, we pretrain a scalable diffusion transformer (DiT) on large-scale text-audio pairs, achieving high-fidelity TTA generation, and then incrementally integrate the timing and phoneme features, expanding controllability. Finally, at the inference stage, we propose progressively guided generation, which sequentially emphasizes more fine-grained information, aligning inherently with the coarse-to-fine sampling nature of DiT. Extensive experiments show that ControlAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of temporal accuracy and speech clarity, significantly outperforming existing methods on both objective and subjective evaluations. Demo samples are available at: https://control-audio.github.io/Control-Audio.

ACL 2026

ControlAudio: Tackling Text-Guided, Timing-Indicated and Intelligible Audio Generation via Progressive Diffusion Modeling

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

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. 
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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.

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches.

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation prediction tasks, we show that ablating these components for concepts (e.g., countries and words) and relations (e.g., capital city and translation language) changes model outputs in predictable ways, while amplifying these components induces counterfactual responses. Notably, composing relation and concept components yields compound counterfactual outputs. Further analysis reveals that while most concept components emerge from the very first layer, more abstract relation components are concentrated in later layers. Lastly, we show that extracted components more comprehensively capture concepts and relations than individual features while maintaining specificity. Overall, our findings suggest a modular organization of knowledge and advance methods for efficient, targeted LLM manipulation.

Sparse Feature Coactivation Reveals Causal Semantic Modules in Large Language Models

Traditional tabular data synthesis methods often overlook the cross-modal heterogeneity of real-world tables, where structured continuous and discrete attributes coexist with unstructured long-text columns. Existing synthesis approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve accurate statistical fidelity for non-textual attributes and consistent semantic constraints between textual and non-textual attributes. In this work, we establish the first benchmark for long-text tabular data synthesis and introduce a novel metric, termed Textual Column Correlation Fidelity (TCCF), to quantify cross-modal semantic alignment. We propose AFT-Tab, an adversarial fine-tuning framework that synergistically trains an LLM-based text generator and a deep-learning-based non-textual generator. Through a dual-feedback mechanism guided by an LLM discriminator, AFT-Tab ensures both precise statistical distributions and rigorous semantic constraints. Experimental results show that AFT-Tab significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in statistical fidelity, TCCF, diversity, and downstream task utility.

AFT-Tab: Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Tabular Data Synthesis with Long Text Columns

Large language models (LLM) often hallucinate, and while adding citations is a common solution, it is frequently insufficient for accountability as users struggle to verify how a cited source supports a generated claim. Existing methods are typically coarse-grained and fail to distinguish between direct quotes and complex reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Generation-time Fine-grained Provenance, a task where models must generate fluent answers while simultaneously producing structured, sentence-level provenance triples. To enable this, we present ReFInE (Relation-aware Fine-grained Interpretability & Evidence), a dataset featuring expert-verified annotations that distinguish between Quotation, Compression, and Inference. Building on ReFInE, we propose GenProve, a framework that combines Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By optimizing a composite reward for answer fidelity and provenance correctness, GenProve significantly outperforms 14 strong LLMs in joint evaluation. Crucially, our analysis uncovers a reasoning gap where models excel at surface-level quotation but struggle significantly with inference-based provenance, suggesting that verifiable reasoning remains a frontier challenge distinct from surface-level citation.

GenProve: Learning to Generate Text with Fine-Grained Provenance

For people affected by blindness and low vision (BLV), safe and independent navigation remains a major challenge, impacting over 2.2 billion individuals worldwide. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for assistive navigation, progress has been limited by the scarcity of accessibility-aware datasets, requiring labor-intensive, expert annotation. To this end, we introduce GuideDog, a novel dataset containing 22K image-description pairs (2K human-verified) capturing real-world pedestrian scenes across 46 countries. Our human-AI pipeline shifts annotation from generation to verification, grounded in established BLV guidance standards from experts and research, improving scalability while maintaining quality. We also present GuideDogQA, an 818-sample benchmark evaluating object recognition and depth perception. Experiments reveal that depth perception and adherence to these standards remain challenging for current MLLMs. Code and dataset will be publicly available.

GuideDog: A Real-World Egocentric Multimodal Dataset for Blind and Low-Vision Accessibility-Aware Guidance

Model merging, typically on Instruct and Thinking models, has shown remarkable performance for efficient reasoning. In this paper, we systematically revisit the simplest merging method that interpolates two weights directly. Particularly, we observe that model interpolation follows a three-stage evolutionary paradigm with distinct behaviors on the reasoning trajectory. These dynamics provide a principled guide for navigating the performance-cost trade-off. Empirical results demonstrate that a strategically interpolated model surprisingly surpasses sophisticated model merging baselines on both efficiency and effectiveness. We further validate our findings with extensive ablation studies on model layers, modules, and decoding strategies. Ultimately, this work demystifies model interpolation and offers a practical framework for crafting models with precisely targeted reasoning capabilities.

Revisiting Model Interpolation for Efficient Reasoning

Recent works have analyzed the impact of individual components of neural networks on gendered predictions, often with a focus on mitigating gender bias. However, mechanistic interpretations of gender tend to (i) focus on a very specific gender-related task, such as gendered pronoun prediction, or (ii) fail to distinguish between the production of \textit{factually gendered outputs} (the correct assumption of gender given a word that carries gender as a semantic property) and \textit{gender biased outputs} (based on a stereotype). To address these issues, we curate Gknow, a benchmark to assess gender knowledge and gender bias in language models across different types of gender-related predictions. Gknow allows us to identify and analyze circuits and individual neurons responsible for gendered predictions. We test the impact of neuron ablation on benchmarks for disentangling stereotypical and factual gender (DiFair and the test set of Gknow), as well as StereoSet. Results show that gender bias and factual gender are severely entangled on the level of both circuits and neurons, entailing that ablation is an unreliable debiasing method. Furthermore, we show that benchmarks for evaluating gender bias can hide the decrease in factual gender knowledge that accompanies neuron ablation. We curate Gknow as a contribution to the continuous development of robust gender bias benchmarks.

GKnow: Measuring the Entanglement of Gender Bias and Factual Gender

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning models have been shown to have worse abstention abilities. Taking the vulnerabilities of reasoning models into account, we propose our Query Misalignment Framework. Hallucinations resulting in failed abstention can be reinterpreted as LLMs answering the wrong question (rather than answering a question incorrectly). Based on this framework, we develop a new class of state-of-the-art abstention methods called **Trace Inversion**. First, we generate the reasoning trace of a model. Based on only the trace, we then reconstruct the most likely query that the model responded to. Finally, we compare the initial query with the reconstructed query. Low similarity score between the initial query and reconstructed query suggests that the model likely answered the question incorrectly and is flagged to abstain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Trace Inversion** effectively boosts abstention performance in four frontier LLMs across nine abstention QA datasets, beating competitive baselines in 33 out of 36 settings. The code is available at this https://anonymous.4open.science/r/trace-inversion-08BB/.

Answering the Wrong Question: Reasoning Trace Inversion for Abstention in LLMs

As LLM-generated text is increasingly used, especially in fictional domains, we explore how much LLM-generated stories differ from human-written stories. In this work, we focus on characters. We borrow definitions from narratology to analyze 8 intricate category-pairs of character, such as stylization and wholeness. These category-pairs consider more than just basic characteristics. They assess how characters are portrayed within their stories. After automatically inferring categories of characters within both LLM and human-written stories, we compare and contrast these two sets of stories. We consider the following overarching questions: (1) Do LLMs and human-written stories have similar characters? and (2) Do LLMs generate stories with a variety of characters? Our analysis includes research questions that focus on stories generated by popular LLMs and recently published human-written stories. We describe a number of interesting similarities, differences and key takeaways.

CASPER in the Machine: Insights into Character Variety in LLM-Generated Stories

Conversational AI is increasingly used in e-commerce to deliver personalized customer support. We present a production RAG-based How-To Assistant that answers support and how-to queries by grounding responses in a proprietary knowledge base. We study three factors that drive quality: (1) document chunking and contextualization for indexing, (2) query refinement methods, and (3) automatic LLM-based evaluation for rapid iteration and reliable measurement. We also describe the end-to-end system workflow - from offline indexing to real-time serving and report deployment metrics, offering practical guidance for building scalable, high-precision RAG assistants in commercial support settings.

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