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Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress on the Text-to-SQL task. However, existing approaches typically depend on static, pre-processed database information supplied at inference time, which restricts the model’s capacity to deeply comprehend the underlying database content. In the absence of dynamic interaction, LLMs are limited to fixed, human-curated context and lack the ability to autonomously query or explore the data. To overcome this limitation, we introduce $\textbf{SDE-SQL}$, a novel framework that empowers LLMs to perform $\textbf{Self-Driven Exploration}$ of databases during inference. This is achieved through the generation and execution of $\textbf{SQL probes}$, enabling the model to actively retrieve information and iteratively refine its understanding of the database. Unlike prior methods, $\textbf{SDE-SQL}$ operates in a $\textbf{zero-shot}$ setting, requiring no in-context demonstrations or question-SQL pairs. Evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with $\texttt{Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct}$, $\textbf{SDE-SQL}$ achieves an $\textbf{8.02}$ \% relative improvement in execution accuracy over the vanilla $\texttt{Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct}$ baseline, establishing a new state-of-the-art among open-source methods without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or model ensembling. Furthermore, when combined with SFT, $\textbf{SDE-SQL}$ delivers an additional $\textbf{0.52}$ \% performance gain.

ACL 2026

SDE-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL Generation in Large Language Models via Self-Driven Exploration with SQL Probes

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially improved the functional correctness of code translation, the critical dimension of execution efficiency remains overlooked. We present \textbf{\textsc{Trace}}, the first benchmark to explicitly assess efficiency in LLM-translated code. \textsc{Trace} includes 1,000 efficiency-critical tasks across C++, Java, and Python, each augmented with stress tests that reveal efficiency disparities often overlooked by small-scale tests. Using \textsc{Trace}, we conduct an extensive evaluation of 28 representative LLMs and highlight several key insights: 1) Correctness and efficiency are often misaligned: the correctness leader Claude-Sonnet-4-Think achieves only moderate time efficiency, outperformed by smaller open-source LLMs such as Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct. 2) Inefficiency is both prevalent and patterned: 23.5\% of correct translations suffer from notable inefficiency, mainly arising from algorithm implementation discrepancy (11.9\%), language construct mismatch (66.4\%), and resource management inefficiency (21.7\%).
3) Inference-time prompt strategies bring only modest improvements, indicating that simple prompting alone is insufficient to improve translation efficiency. Together, our results establish execution efficiency as an essential dimension of code translation and position \textsc{Trace} as a principled foundation for efficiency-oriented evaluation. Our code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/Albert-Gong/TRACE}.

TRACE: Evaluating Execution Efficiency of LLM-Based Code Translation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet often fail to preserve and effectively leverage visual evidence throughout generation. We identify three fundamental types of visual grounding failures: Long-Context Grounding Error, where visual information gradually decays over long sequences; Fine-Grained Grounding Error, where low-resolution or degraded inputs hinder the recovery of detailed visual information; and Regional Grounding Error, where spatially diffuse attention weakens region-level vision-language alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tool-augmented reasoning framework with three targeted compensation strategies: reuse, which re-injects the original image to mitigate visual forgetting; focus_area, which constrains attention to task-relevant regions; and zoom_in, which enhances visual resolution for fine-grained perception. We further construct the TWI-Tools-146K dataset and develop Simple-VGC, a tool-augmented MLLM that interleaves visual and textual tokens. Extensive experiments show that each tool yields targeted improvements for its corresponding grounding error, while their combination produces synergistic gains in visual reasoning. Beyond performance, our analysis provides mechanistic insights into how tool-based interventions improve visual grounding, pointing toward more reliable multimodal reasoning.

Simple-VGC: Enhancing Visual Grounding in Multimodal Reasoning via Adaptive Tool Composition

Classifier-based Quality Filtering has recently emerged as a fundamental technique in constructing pre-training corpora. The ability to deploy a single model that can replace or supplement a set of heuristics has proven effective across numerous Large Language Models. In this work, we expose a critical vulnerability in this approach by demonstrating how a straightforward Wikipedia-style reformatting operation can substantially alter a model's quality assessment and enable low-quality content to surpass filtering thresholds. Our analysis reveals that the FineWeb-Edu CQF model would reverse its filtering decision for approximately 7% of evaluated documents, thereby admitting content into the pre-training corpus that would otherwise have been excluded.

Is a Document Educational or Just Wikipedia-Style? — Pitfalls of Classifier-Based Quality Filtering

Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with $100M \sim 1B$ parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.

EfficientLLM: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models

We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for helpfulness, exposure to user information, emotional and subjective dialogue, and debugging code printing internal variables, among others. Finetuned models lose their ability to reason about contextual privacy norms, share information inappropriately with tools, and violate memory boundaries across contexts. Privacy collapse is a “silent failure” because models maintain high performance on standard safety and utility benchmarks whilst exhibiting severe privacy vulnerabilities. Our experiments show evidence of privacy collapse across six models (closed and open weight), five fine-tuning datasets (real-world and controlled data), and two task categories (agentic and memory-based). Our mechanistic analysis reveals that privacy representations are uniquely fragile to fine-tuning, compared to task-relevant features which are preserved. Our results reveal a critical gap in current safety evaluations, in particular for the deployment of specialised agents.

Privacy Collapse: Benign Fine-Tuning Can Break Contextual Privacy in Language Models

Efficient CUDA implementations of attention mechanisms are critical to modern deep learning systems, yet supporting diverse and evolving attention variants remains challenging. Existing frameworks and compilers trade performance for flexibility, while expert-written kernels achieve high efficiency but are difficult to adapt. Recent work explores large language models (LLMs) for GPU kernel generation, but prior studies report unstable correctness and significant performance gaps for complex operators such as attention.

We present CuBridge, an LLM-based framework that adapts expert-written attention kernels through a structured lift–transfer–lower workflow. CuBridge starts from expert-written CUDA attention kernels and lifts them into an executable intermediate representation that makes execution orchestration explicit while abstracting low-level CUDA syntax. Given a user-provided PyTorch specification, CuBridge generates and verifies a target IR program, then reconstructs optimized CUDA code via reference-guided lowering. Across diverse attention variants and GPU platforms, CuBridge consistently produces correct kernels and substantially outperforms general frameworks, compiler-based approaches, and prior LLM-based methods.

CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications, where they must follow system- or developer-specified instructions that define the intended task behavior, while completing benign user requests. When adversarial instructions appear in user queries or externally retrieved content, models may override intended logic. Recent defenses rely on supervised fine-tuning with benign and malicious labels. Although these methods achieve high attack rejection rates, we find that they rely on narrow correlations in defense data rather than harmful intent, leading to systematic rejection of safe inputs. We analyze three recurring shortcut behaviors induced by defense fine-tuning. Position bias arises when benign content placed later in a prompt is rejected at much higher rates; across reasoning benchmarks, suffix-task rejection rises from below 10% to as high as 90%. Token trigger bias occurs when strings common in attack data raise rejection probability even in benign contexts; inserting a single trigger token increases false refusals by up to 50%. Topic generalization bias reflects poor generalization beyond the defense data distribution, with defended models suffering test-time accuracy drops of up to 40%. These findings suggest that current prompt-injection defenses frequently respond to attack-like surface patterns rather than the underlying intent. We introduce controlled diagnostic datasets and a systematic evaluation across two base models and multiple defense pipelines, highlighting limitations of supervised fine-tuning for reliable LLM security.

Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the factual accuracy of large language model (LLM) outputs by grounding generation in external knowledge. Recent agentic RAG systems extend this paradigm by introducing critic agents that evaluate model responses and iteratively refine outputs. However, most prior work implicitly assumes reliable critic feedback and focuses on planning strategies, while paying limited attention to the robustness of the error correction process itself, which is often hindered by misaligned error categories and ineffective or incorrect corrections. We hypothesize that RAG performance can be improved without explicit error categorization. To this end, we propose RePAIR, a response–action learning paradigm that directly maps flawed RAG outputs to error-mitigating action plans without relying on fine-grained error taxonomies or explicit critic supervision. Across multiple benchmarks, RePAIR consistently improves agentic RAG performance.

Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation without Taxonomy-based Error Categorization

Masked diffusion language models present a promising paradigm for language modeling, yet the systematic theoretical analysis and comprehensive empirical validation of their alignment on general tasks remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we identify the primary challenge for this problem: the high variance in Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO)-based likelihood estimates required for preference optimization. To address this issue, we propose *Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization* (VRPO), a framework that formally analyzes the bias and variance of the preference optimization loss and gradient based on Direct Preference Optimization, showing both are governed by a score-estimator variance. Building on this foundation, we introduce multiple unbiased variance reduction strategies, including optimal budget allocation and antithetic sampling, to improve alignment performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VRPO by applying it to LLaDA, a large diffusion language model. The resulting model, LLaDA 1.5, consistently outperforms its SFT-only predecessor consistently across various general benchmarks, such as mathematics (GSM8K +4.7), coding (HumanEval +3.0, MBPP +1.8), and alignment (IFEval +4.0, Arena-Hard +4.3). Furthermore, LLaDA 1.5 demonstrates a highly competitive mathematical performance compared to other strong language MDMs and ARMs. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/GSAI-ML/LLaDA-1.5.

LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Models

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed fake news detection and fact-checking tasks from simple classification to complex reasoning. However, evaluation frameworks have not kept pace. Current benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to benchmark data contamination (BDC) and ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveFact a continuously updated benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" in misinformation detection. LiveFact uses dynamic, temporal evidence sets to evaluate models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information rather than on memorized knowledge. We propose a dual-mode evaluation: Classification Mode for final verification and Inference Mode for evidence-based reasoning, along with a component to monitor BDC explicitly. Tests with 22 LLMs show that open-source Mixture-of-Experts models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B, now match or outperform proprietary state-of-the-art systems. More importantly, our analysis finds a significant "reasoning gap." Capable models exhibit epistemic humility by recognizing unverifiable claims in early data slices-an aspect traditional static benchmarks overlook. LiveFact sets a sustainable standard for evaluating robust, temporally aware AI verification.

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